They also found the (neutral) statistics and methodology unimpressive. From reading exactly the same material, the two groups moved even further apart in their views. They had each reframed the evidence to fit in with their preexisting beliefs.
Festinger’s great achievement was to show that cognitive dissonance is a deeply ingrained human trait. The more we have riding on our judgments, the more we are likely to manipulate any new evidence that calls them into question.
Now let us take these insights back to the subject with which we started this chapter. For it turns out that cognitive dissonance has had huge and often astonishing effects on the workings of the criminal justice system.
IV
On March 20, 1987, a young girl was attacked in her home in Billings, Montana. The Innocence Project, the nonprofit organization set up by two New York lawyers, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, to help prisoners obtain DNA tests, describes the crime as follows:
The young girl was attacked by an intruder who had broken in through a window.

…

Imagine what it must be like to be confronted with evidence that they have assisted in putting the wrong person in jail; that they have ruined the life of an innocent person; that the wounds of the victim’s family are going to be reopened. It must be stomach churning. In terms of cognitive dissonance, it is difficult to think of anything more threatening.
As Richard Ofshe, a social psychologist, has put it: “[Convicting the wrong person is] one of the worst professional mistakes you can make—like a physician amputating the wrong arm.”21
Just think of how desperate they would be to reframe the fatality. The theory of cognitive dissonance is the only way to get a handle on the otherwise bewildering reaction of prosecutors and police (and, indeed, the wider system) to exonerating DNA evidence. “It is almost like a state of denial,” Scheck says. “They just couldn’t see the new evidence for what it was.”

…

In other words, the victim had had consensual sex with another man, but had subsequently been raped by the prisoner, who had used a condom.22
This is the domino effect of cognitive dissonance: the reframing process takes on a life of its own.
The presence of an entirely new man, not mentioned at the initial trial, for whom there were no eyewitnesses, and whom the victim often couldn’t remember having sex with, may seem like a desperate ploy to evade the evidence. But it has been used so often that it has been given a name by defense lawyers: “the unindicted co-ejaculator.”
It is a term that usefully captures the power of cognitive dissonance.
Schulz quotes from a fascinating interview with Peter Neufeld of the Innocence Project:
We’ll be leaving the courtroom after an exoneration and the prosecutor will say “We still think your client is guilty and we are going to retry him.”

pages: 254words: 79,052

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation
by
Chris Nodder

Maybe this new outlook is partially due to his award of the 2011 Ig Nobel mathematics prize (jointly with several other prophets) for “teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.”
Provide reasons for people to use
If you expect that users will be conflicted about the product or service you offer, provide them with many reasons they can use to resolve cognitive dissonance and keep their pride intact.
Online, cognitive dissonance can be brought about by effects such as buyer’s remorse, in which the purchaser struggles to justify the high purchase price and their desire for an item in comparison to their subsequent feelings of the item’s worth.
Sites help users resolve this cognitive dissonance by giving them reasons and evidence that bolster their satisfaction with the product (positive reviews; images of famous people using the product; and promises of hard-to-quantify benefits, such as social approval brought about by using the product) rather than letting them resolve the dissonance by returning the product.

If you can get people to make a public commitment to the new approach, it means they can no longer back down. The public commitment might set off more cognitive dissonance, but now, because they have openly aligned themselves with the new approach, the dissonant belief that will be expelled is the old one.
At this point, the individual will start to rationalize their new behaviors. Now you are back in the position of wanting to leverage inertia again. You can assist by providing reasons that allow the individual to keep their self-esteem intact, and by showing social proof for the new behaviors. The individual whose mindset you just changed will be a willing participant in this process. They will tend to be selective in what data they look for and believe. Because they are now trying to remove cognitive dissonance in favor of the new idea that you introduced, they will seek out reviews, certification, and other social proof that supports that viewpoint in order to reach closure once again.

More on this in Chapter 9.
129
virus
of the
mind
If you’re in a situation where you’re being rewarded for
some behavior, think about what memes that operant conditioning is programming you with. Do they serve your purpose
in life?
Cognitive Dissonance
Another programming technique is creating mental pressure
and resolving it—cognitive dissonance. Why do high-pressure sales
tactics exist even though people universally despise them? As with
any “why” question in the world of memetics, the answer is: because
the meme for it is good at spreading. Salespeople get infected with the
high-pressure sales meme and go about acting on it, regardless of
whether it’s the most effective means at their disposal. There’s no
question, however, that it does work on some people some of the
time.
High-pressure sales work by making you mentally uncomfortable—by creating cognitive dissonance. You enter the situation with
some strategy-memes that make you resist buying: perhaps they are
something like Look before you leap or Shop around before you buy.

…

— The second way is through a mechanism known as cognitive dissonance. When things don’t make sense, our minds struggles to make them make sense.
Imagine, for example, that a friend is upset with you, but you
don’t know why. You have two memes that conflict—that are
inconsistent: friend and upset with me. You resolve the conflict, or
dissonance, by creating new memes, by rearranging your memetic
programming so that things make sense again. Ah, Bill’s upset
because he’s paid for lunch the last three times, you might conclude.
Right or wrong, you now have a new meme about Bill and lunch
that will influence your future behavior.
I’ve heard it said that geniuses develop their most brilliant
original thoughts through self-imposed cognitive dissonance. As
126
How We Get Programmed
you might guess, then, as a programming method it is particularly
effective with intelligent people, because you actually believe that
the new meme is your own idea

…

Those new memes conflict with your old ones, and a mental tension is created. Your mind wants to resolve the conflict. It
does so by creating a new meme.
There are two ways to release the pressure caused by cognitive dissonance: buy in or bail out. If you bail out, it’s likely to be
because you’ve resolved the dissonance by creating a meme such
as The salesperson is a jerk. But some people buy, creating instead a
meme like I really want to buy this. Once you create that meme, it’s
yours, and a smart salesperson will reinforce it by telling you what
130
How We Get Programmed
a smart decision you’ve made and even calling a few days later and
congratulating you on your purchase.
Cognitive dissonance can be used to create a meme of submission and loyalty to whatever authority is causing the dissonance.
Fraternity hazings, boot camp, and some religious or spiritual disciplines put people through difficult tests and may demand demonstrations of loyalty before releasing the pressure.

If he should ever lift his nose out of the minutiae of his fascinating
business and view its history whole, he would be forced to admit the sad truth
that pitifully few nancial experts have ever known for two years (much less
fteen) what was going to happen to any class of securities—and that the
majority are usually spectacularly wrong in a much shorter time than that.4
Although Schwed’s book was anecdotal and presented no statistical evidence, it was
an early and effective statement of the efficient markets theory.
Cognitive Dissonance and Hypocrisy
Cognitive dissonance, a term coined by social psychologist Leon Festinger, is a negative
emotional response, a feeling of psychological pain, when something con icts with
one’s stated beliefs—an emotional response that may lead to something other than a
rational updating of the beliefs.5 In particular, when a person’s own actions are
revealed to be inconsistent with certain beliefs, he or she often just conveniently
changes those beliefs. Hypocrisy is one particular manifestation of cognitive dissonance,
in which a person espouses opinions out of convenience and to justify certain actions,
while often at some level actually believing them.
The evidence that Festinger and his successors presented is solid: cognitive
dissonance is a genuine phenomenon and leads with some regularity to human error—or
at times to what we would label sleaziness.

…

The evidence that Festinger and his successors presented is solid: cognitive
dissonance is a genuine phenomenon and leads with some regularity to human error—or
at times to what we would label sleaziness. And yet there remains skepticism about
cognitive dissonance in many quarters, particularly among people who feel committed
to the fully rational model of human behavior.
Recently a new form of evidence has appeared in support of Festinger’s theory. It
has been found that brain structure is fundamentally tied to cognitive dissonance.
Neuroscientist Vincent van Veen and his colleagues put human subjects in an
experimental situation in which they were paid or otherwise incentivized to lie about
their true beliefs as they were observed by functional magnetic resonance imaging. The
researchers found that certain regions of the brain, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex
and the anterior insula, were stimulated during this experience.

…

Importantly, those
subjects with more activity in these regions showed a stronger tendency to change their
actual beliefs to be consonant with the beliefs they were made to espouse.6 We thus have
evidence of a physical structure in the brain whose actions are correlated with the
outcome of cognitive dissonance, and that thus appears to be part of a brain mechanism
that produces the phenomenon Festinger described based solely on his observations of
human behavior.
If hypocrisy is built into the brain, then there is a potential for human error that can
be of great economic signi cance. A whole economic system can take as given certain
assumptions, such as, for example, the belief in the years before the current nancial
crisis that “home prices can never fall.” That theory was adopted by millions of people
who would have experienced cognitive dissonance had they not done so, either because
they were involved one way or another in a system that was overselling real estate or
because they themselves had invested in real estate.

What happens when a seductive synoptic ideology suffers “breakage,” as our commentators have it? It would be odd if this had not been a major topic of exploration, since it speaks so directly to our images of ourselves and others. While there have been many modes and idioms in which the question has been broached, for the sake of brevity we shall describe but one: the attempt to comprehend these responses as a case study in the social psychological problem of cognitive dissonance. The father of “cognitive dissonance theory” was the social psychologist Leon Festinger. In his premier work on the subject, he addressed the canonical problem situation which captures the predicament of the contemporary economics profession:
Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart . . . suppose that he is then presented with unequivocal and undeniable evidence that his belief is wrong: what will happen?

…

The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting people.24
This profound insight, that confrontation with contrary evidence may actually augment and sharpen the conviction and enthusiasm of a true believer, was explained as a response to the cognitive dissonance evoked by a disconfirmation of strongly held beliefs. The thesis that humans are more rationalizing than rational has spawned a huge literature, but one that gets little respect in economics.25 Cognitive dissonance and the responses it provokes venture well beyond the literature in the philosophy of science that travels under the rubric of Duhem’s Thesis, in that the former plumbs response mechanisms to emotional chagrin, whereas the latter sketches the myriad ways in which auxiliary hypotheses may be evoked in order to blunt the threat of disconfirmation.

…

Predominantly, the long history of schooling, socialization, and past experience induces a stubborn inertia into cognitive processes. More commonly, people react to potential disconfirmation of strongly held views by adjusting their own understandings of the doctrine in question to accommodate the contrary evidence; this has been discussed in the social psychology literature under the rubric of “cognitive dissonance,” and in the philosophy literature as Duhem’s Thesis. Cognition sports an inescapable social dimension as well: people cannot vet and validate even a small proportion of the knowledge to which they subscribe, and so must of necessity depend heavily upon others such as teachers and experts and peers to underwrite much of their beliefs.23 And then there is a second major consideration relevant to our current conundrum, namely, the issue of whether most people who may subscribe to something like neoliberalism actually understand it to be constituted as a coherent doctrine with a spelled-out roster of propositions, or instead treat their notions as disparate implications of other beliefs.

Thus, the widespread belief in political authority does not provide strong evidence for the reality of political authority, since that belief can be explained as the product of systematic bias.
6.3 Cognitive dissonance
According to the widely accepted theory of cognitive dissonance, we experience an uncomfortable state, known as ‘cognitive dissonance’, when we have two or more cognitions that stand in conflict or tension with one another – and particularly when our behavior or other reactions appear to conflict with our self-image.15 We then tend to alter our beliefs or reactions to reduce the dissonance. For instance, a person who sees himself as compassionate yet finds himself inflicting pain on others will experience cognitive dissonance. He might reduce this dissonance by ceasing to inflict pain, changing his image of himself, or adopting auxiliary beliefs to explain why a compassionate person may inflict pain in this situation.

Some believe that it is dangerous to undermine belief in authority.
6.1.2 The appeal to popular opinion
Some believe that the rejection of authority is too far from common-sense political beliefs to be taken seriously.
6.2 The Milgram experiments
6.2.1 Setup
Milgram devised an experiment in which subjects would be ordered to administer electric shocks to helpless others.
6.2.2 Predictions
Most people expect that subjects will defy the orders of the experimenter.
6.2.3 Results
Two-thirds of subjects obey fully, even to the point of administering apparently lethal shocks.
6.2.4 The dangers of obedience
The experiment shows that belief in authority is very dangerous.
6.2.5 The unreliability of opinions about authority
The experiment also shows that people have a strong pro-authority bias.
6.3 Cognitive dissonance
People may seek to rationalize their own obedience to the state by devising theories of authority.
6.4 Social proof and status quo bias
People are biased toward commonly held beliefs and the practices of their own society.
6.5 The power of political aesthetics
6.5.1 Symbols
The state employs symbols to create an emotional and aesthetic sense of its own power and authority.
6.5.2 Rituals
Rituals serve a similar function.
6.5.3 Authoritative language
Legal language and the language of some political philosophers serve to encourage feelings of respect for authority.
6.6 Stockholm Syndrome and the charisma of power
6.6.1 The phenomenon of Stockholm Syndrome
Kidnapping victims sometimes emotionally bond with their captors, as in the case of the Stockholm bank robbery.
6.6.2 Why does Stockholm Syndrome occur?

Little investments, such as placing a tiny sign in a window, can lead to big changes in future behaviors.
We Avoid Cognitive Dissonance
In a classic Aesop’s Fable, a hungry fox encounters grapes hanging from a vine. The fox desperately wants the grapes. But as hard as he may try, he can not reach them. Frustrated, the fox decides the grapes must be sour and that he therefore would not want them anyway.
In the story, the fox comforts himself by changing his perception of the grapes because it is too uncomfortable to reconcile the thought that the grapes are sweet and ready for the taking, and yet, he can not have them. To reconcile these two conflicting ideas, the fox changes his perception of the grapes and in the process relieves the pain of what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance.”
The irrational manipulation of the way one sees the world is not limited to fictional animals in children’s stories.

…

Our innate reaction to these acquired tastes is to reject them, and yet, we learn to like them through repeated exposure. We see others enjoying them, try a little more, and over time condition ourselves. To avoid the cognitive dissonance of not liking something in which others seem to take so much pleasure, we slowly change our perception of the thing we once did not enjoy.
***
Together, the three tendencies described above influence our future actions. The more effort we put into something, the more likely we are to value it. We are more likely to be consistent with our past behaviors. And finally, we change our preferences to avoid cognitive dissonance.
In sum, our tendencies lead to a mental process known as rationalization whereby we change our attitudes and beliefs to psychologically adapt. Rationalization helps us give reasons for our behaviors, even when those reasons might have been designed by others.

…

User habits are hard to break and confer powerful competitive advantages to any company fortunate enough to successfully create them.
***
Remember and Share
- The Investment Phase is the fourth step in the Hook Model.
- Unlike the Action Phase, which delivers immediate gratification, the Investment Phase is about the anticipation of rewards in the future.
- Investments in a product create preference because of our tendency to overvalue our work, be consistent with past behaviors, and avoid cognitive dissonance.
- Investment comes after the variable reward phase when users are primed to reciprocate.
- Investments increase the likelihood of users returning by improving the service the more it is used. They enable the accrual of stored value in the form of content, data, followers, reputation or skill.
- Investments increase the likelihood of users passing through the Hook again by loading the next trigger to start the cycle all over again.
***
Do This Now
Refer to the answers you came up with in the last “Do This Now” section to complete the following exercises:
- Review your flow.

In the meantime, though, they all pooh-pooh the interest of such a goal…
How to Reduce Cognitive Dissonance in a Fox
Æsop’s fox-and-grapes fable, more than two millennia old, insightfully anticipated some rather recent ideas. From the 1950’s onwards, thanks to the pioneering work of social psychologist Leon Festinger, the notions of cognitive dissonance and its reduction have been part of psychology, and they are direct descendants of the fable, which, in expositions of the theory, is often given as a quintessential example. The basic idea of the contemporary theories is that the presence of conflicting cognitive states in an individual results in a state of inner tension that the individual tries to reduce by modifying one or another of their conflicting internal states. Thus, the fox is in a state of cognitive dissonance, since his desire to eat the grapes conflicts with his inability to reach them.

…

Much as the concept once bitten, twice shy contains the essence of the modern psychological notion that a traumatic experience leaves lasting after-effects in its wake, so the sour-grapes fable contains the essence of the notion of reduction of cognitive dissonance, and more generally, the notion of rationalization, where a painful situation is rendered less painful by the unconscious generation, after the fact, of some kind of arbitrary and often unlikely justification.
The blatant nature of the fox’s lie makes the fable an ideal core member of the sour grapes category, and allows one to understand the structure of all sour grapes situations. The genius of Æsop was to have come up with such a simple, appealing situation in which dissonance is reduced. For this reason, his fable not only has survived many centuries but it also anticipated developments in modern psychology.
To see how the sour-grapes fable relates to the notion of cognitive dissonance in its full generality, one can cast the notion of disparagement of an unrealized yearning, which is the fable’s crux, as a special case of the more general notion of regaining a peaceful frame of mind by distorting one’s perception of a troubling situation, which is what the reduction of cognitive dissonance is all about.

…

Here we’ll take an example involving Kellie and Dick, two friends who came from Boston to the house of the above-mentioned professore a number of years after he had returned to the United States, and who visited for a few days. As it happened, Kellie and Dick both used the term “your office” to designate the standard workplace of their host, while he himself would always call it “my study”. After he had put up with this cognitive dissonance for a couple of days, it occurred to him to ask them, “How come the two of you always go around talking about my ‘office’ when you both know perfectly well that I always call it my ‘study’?”
This question caught the Bostonians by surprise, but they quickly hit upon an answer to it, and it was almost surely the answer. They said, “In our Boston house, the place where we work [they had a small public-relations firm that they ran from their house] is on the third floor — our house’s top floor — and we always call it our ‘office’.

When Sex Becomes the Lion
Sex and the Survivor
Origin of Love
The Science of Falling in Love
Attachment and Sex: The Dark Side
Attachment and Sex: Sex That Advances the Plot
Attachment Style
Managing Attachment: Your Feels as a Sleepy Hedgehog
Survival of the Social
The Water of Life
5. Cultural Context: A Sex-Positive Life in a Sex-Negative World
Three Messages
You Are Beautiful
Criticizing Yourself = Stress = Reduced Sexual Pleasure
Health at Every Size
“Dirty”
When Somebody “Yucks” Your “Yum”
Maximizing Yum . . . with Science! Part 1: Self-Compassion
Maximizing Yum . . . with Science! Part 2: Cognitive Dissonance
Maximizing Yum . . . with Science! Part 3: Media Nutrition
You Do You
part 3 sex in action
6. Arousal: Lubrication Is Not Causation
Measuring and Defining Nonconcordance
All the Same Parts, Organized in Different Ways: “This Is a Restaurant”
Nonconcordance in Other Emotions
Lubrication Error #1: Genital Response = “Turned On”
Lubrication Error #2: Genital Response Is Enjoying
Lubrication Error #3: Nonconcordance Is a Problem
Medicating Away the Brakes
“Honey . . .

…

You’ll notice that your brain tries to list all the things you don’t like, but don’t include those. Do it again every week. Or twice a week. Or more. Each time, the things you like will become a little more salient and the noise will get a little quieter. Maybe even consider telling someone else about what you see and what you like. Better still, tell someone who also did the exercise!
It’s an activity that gets labeled cognitive dissonance because it forces us to be aware of good things, when mostly we tend to be aware of the “negative” things. Try it.
2. Ask your partner, if you have one, to have a close look. Turn on the light, take off your clothes, get on your back, and let them look. Ask them what they see, how they feel about it, what memories they have of your vulva. Let your partner know what you’ve felt worried about, and ask for help to see what they see.

…

Like body self-criticism, disgust is so entrenched in the sexual culture that it’s difficult to know what our sexual wellbeing would be like without it. But there’s growing evidence that disgust is impairing our sexual wellbeing, much as body self-criticism does, and there are things you can do to weed it out, if you want to.
And that’s what I’ll talk about in the last section of this chapter. I’ll describe research-based strategies for creating positive change in both self-criticism and disgust: self-compassion, cognitive dissonance, and basic media literacy. The goal is to help you recognize what you’ve been taught, deliberately or otherwise, in order to help you choose whether to continue believing those things. You may well choose to keep a lot of what you learned—what matters is that you choose it, instead of letting your beliefs about your body and sex be chosen for you by the accident of the culture and family you were born into.

We rail against exploitation of low-paid workers in Asia as we drive twenty minutes to the Big Box to save three bucks on tube socks and a dollar on underpants. We fume over the mistreatment of animals by agribusiness but freak out at an uptick in food prices. We lecture our kids on social responsibility and then buy them toys assembled by destitute child workers on some far flung foreign shore. Maintaining cognitive dissonance is one way to navigate a world of contradictions, and on an individual basis there’s much to be said for this. But somehow the Age of Cheap has raised cognitive dissonance to a societal norm.
On May 1, 2008, the New York Times ran a cover story in its Styles section headlined “Is This the World’s Cheapest Dress?: How Steve & Barry’s Became a $1 Billion Company Selling Celebrity Style for $8.98.” Reporter Eric Wilson reveals the secret of the store’s success with a quote from co-owner Steve Shore: “‘To be great, you have to have these ridiculous, insane prices, and not sacrifice quality,’ [Steve] ‘The question we constantly ask ourselves is how to hit the price point that even Wal-Mart is not hitting.’ ” How, indeed?

…

Shore and Prevor kept their operation afloat by locating stores in struggling malls and charging them an up-front fee for the favor of attracting foot traffic. Since these mall fees were essential to its survival, the company was required to expand continuously. In a sense, the company relied for its existence on a fully legal variation of a Ponzi scheme. Business plans like this are not built on a foundation of frugality. They are built on a platform of cognitive dissonance. Three months after boasting of their great success to the New York Times, Steve and Barry filed for bankruptcy.
THRIFT MAY BE a bedrock American virtue, but it is no more branded into our DNA than it is branded into the DNA of any other culture. Benjamin Franklin, whose most famous homily translates roughly into “A penny saved is a penny earned,” confessed that thrift would elude even him were it not for Deborah, his frugal and hardworking wife.

…

American corporate interests have chipped away at those standards and wages in order to maximize profits and influence, and to serve their shareholders. The chronic disregard for workers’ rights in China’s foreign-invested private sector threatens wages and working conditions around the globe, including the hard-won gains of American workers.
Labor scholar Robert Bruno, a political economist at the University of Illinois, has observed that most Americans tend not to think of themselves as “workers.” This demands some level of cognitive dissonance because most of us do work for a living. But in a society where salesclerks in discount stores are called “associates” and garbage collectors “sanitary engineers,” the term “worker” has lost meaning. Bruno is certain that this is no accident, and explained why in one of several conversations we had over many months.
“The Labor Department classifies 45 percent of Americans as ‘working class,’ but Americans all consider themselves part of the middle class.

One obstacle to doing so is the feeling of being right, shored up as it is by everything from our sensory impressions to our social relations to the structure of human cognition. But a second and paradoxical obstacle is our fear of being wrong. True, certainty cannot protect us from error, any more than shouting a belief can make it true. But it can and does shield us, at least temporarily, from facing our fallibility.
The psychologist Leon Festinger documented this protective effect of certainty in the 1950s, in the study that gave us the now-famous term “cognitive dissonance.” Along with several colleagues and hired observers, Festinger infiltrated a group of people who believed in the doomsday prophecies of a suburban housewife named (actually, pseudonymed) Marian Keech. Keech claimed that she was in touch with a Jesuslike figure from outer space who sent her messages about alien visits, spaceship landings, and the impending destruction of the world by flood.

…

.* The fact is, with the exception of our own minds, no power on earth has the consistent and absolute ability to convince us that we are wrong. However much we might be prompted by cues from other people or our environment, the choice to face up to error is ultimately ours alone.
Why can we do this sometimes but not others? For one thing, as we saw earlier, it’s a lot harder to let go of a belief if we don’t have a new one to replace it. For another, as Leon Festinger observed in his study of cognitive dissonance, it’s a lot harder if we are heavily invested in that belief—if, to borrow a term from economics, we have accrued significant sunk costs. Traditionally, sunk costs refer to money that is already spent and can’t be recovered. Let’s say you shelled out five grand for a used car, and three weeks later it got a flat tire. When you take it to the mechanic, he tells you that you need both rear tires replaced and the alignment adjusted.

When they are fooled in a fake experiment into thinking they have delivered shocks to another subject, they derogate the victim, implying that he deserved the punishment. Everyone has heard of “reducing cognitive dissonance,” in which people invent a new opinion to resolve a contradiction in their minds. For example, a person will recall enjoying a boring task if he had agreed to recommend it to others for paltry pay. (If the person had been enticed to recommend the task for generous pay, he accurately recalls that the task was boring.) As originally conceived of by the psychologist Leon Festinger, cognitive dissonance is an unsettled feeling that arises from an inconsistency in one’s beliefs. But that’s not right: there is no contradiction between the proposition “The task is boring” and the proposition “I was pressured into lying that the task was fun.”

…

But that’s not right: there is no contradiction between the proposition “The task is boring” and the proposition “I was pressured into lying that the task was fun.” Another social psychologist, Eliot Aronson, nailed it down: people doctor their beliefs only to eliminate a contradiction with the proposition “I am nice and in control.” Cognitive dissonance is always triggered by blatant evidence that you are not as beneficent and effective as you would like people to think. The urge to reduce it is the urge to get your self-serving story straight.
Sometimes we have glimpses of our own self-deception. When does a negative remark sting, cut deep, hit a nerve? When some part of us knows it is true. If every part knew it was true, the remark would not sting; it would be old news. If no part thought it was true, the remark would roll off; we could dismiss it as false. Trivers recounts an experience that is all too familiar (at least to me).

It would have been easy for someone of her stature to reject outright the critics’ views, refuse to change the show, lose her investors’ money, set back the careers of her young dancers, and go to the grave convinced that the world had misunderstood her masterpiece.
Why is denial such a natural tendency? Psychologists have a name for the root cause which has become famous enough that many non-psychologists will recognise the term: cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance describes the mind’s difficulty in holding two apparently contradictory thoughts simultaneously: in Tharp’s case, ‘I am a capable, experienced and respected choreographer’ and ‘My latest creation is stupefyingly clichéd.’ This odd phenomenon was first pinned down in an ingenious laboratory experiment half a century ago. Leon Festinger and James Carlsmith asked their experimental subjects to perform a tedious task – emptying and refilling a tray with spools, using one hand – for half an hour.

It actually is better for your well-being to give money than to receive it,1 and kind consideration of others makes one happier.2 But this doesn’t affect the logic of Pascal’s payoff matrix.)
Pity the poor atheist if Pascal got the payoffs right in the event that God exists. Only a fool would fail to believe. But unfortunately you can’t just grunt and produce belief.
Pascal had a solution to this problem, though. And in solving the problem he invented a new psychological theory—what we would now call cognitive dissonance theory. If our beliefs are incongruent with our behavior, something has to change: either our beliefs or our behavior. We don’t have direct control over our beliefs but we do have control over our behavior. And because dissonance is a noxious state, our beliefs move into line with our behavior.
Pascal’s prescription for atheists is to proceed “by doing everything as if they believed, by taking holy water, by having Masses said, etc.… This will make you believe … What have you to lose?”

…

., “Findings from the 2008 Administration of the College Senior Survey (CSS): National Aggregates.”
11. Sanchez-Burks, “Performance in Intercultural Interactions at Work: Cross-Cultural Differences in Responses to Behavioral Mirroring.”
12. Goethals and Reckman, “The Perception of Consistency in Attitudes.”
13. Goethals, Cooper, and Naficy, “Role of Foreseen, Foreseeable, and Unforeseeable Behavioral Consequences in the Arousal of Cognitive Dissonance.”
14. Nisbett et al., “Behavior as Seen by the Actor and as Seen by the Observer.”
15. Ibid.
16. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought; Nisbett et al., “Culture and Systems of Thought: Holistic Vs. Analytic Cognition.”
17. Masuda et al., “Placing the Face in Context: Cultural Differences in the Perception of Facial Emotion.”
18. Masuda and Nisbett, “Attending Holistically vs. Analytically: Comparing the Context Sensitivity of Japanese and Americans.”
19.

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The Creative Process. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1952/1980.
Gilovich, Thomas, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky. “The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences.” Cognitive Personality 17 (1985): 295–314.
Goethals, George R., Joel Cooper, and Anahita Naficy. “Role of Foreseen, Foreseeable, and Unforeseeable Behavioral Consequences in the Arousal of Cognitive Dissonance.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37 (1979): 1179–85.
Goethals, George R., and Richard F. Reckman. “The Perception of Consistency in Attitudes.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 9 (1973): 491–501.
Goldstein, Noah J., Robert B. Cialdini, and Vladas Griskevicius. “A Room with a Viewpoint: Using Social Norms to Motivate Environmental Conservation in Hotels.” Journal of Consumer Research 35 (2008): 472–82.

There’s a reason for this, and it’s one of the best-researched principles in psychology. It’s called cognitive dissonance. It refers to the disconnect between what we believe in our minds and what we experience or see in reality. The underlying theory is simple. The more we are committed to believing that something is true, the less likely we are to believe that its opposite is true, even in the face of clear evidence that shows we are wrong. For example, if you believe your colleague Bill is a jerk, you will filter Bill’s actions through that belief. No matter what Bill does, you’ll see it through a prism that confirms he’s a jerk. Even the times when he’s not a jerk, you’ll interpret it as the exception to the rule that Bill’s a jerk. It may take years of saintly behavior for Bill to overcome your perception. That’s cognitive dissonance applied to others. It can be a disruptive and unfair force in the workplace.

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It can be a disruptive and unfair force in the workplace.
Yet cognitive dissonance actually works in favor of successful people when they apply it to themselves. The more we are committed to believing that something is true, the less likely we are to believe that its opposite is true, even in the face of evidence that shows we may have chosen the wrong path. It’s the reason successful people don’t buckle and waver when times get tough. Their commitment to their goals and beliefs allows them to view reality through rose-tinted glasses. That’s a good thing in many situations. Their personal commitment encourages people to “stay the course” and to not give up when the going gets tough.
Of course, this same steadfastness can work against successful people when they should change course.
How Our Success Makes Us Superstitious
These four success beliefs—that we have the skills, the confidence, the motivation, and the free choice to succeed—make us superstitious.

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It’s not enough to tell everyone that you want to get better; you have to declare exactly in what area you plan to change. In other words, now that you’ve said you’re sorry, what are you going to do about it?
I tell my clients, “It’s a lot harder to change people’s perception of your behavior than it is to change your behavior. In fact, I calculate that you have to get 100% better in order to get 10% credit for it from your coworkers.”
The logic behind this is, as I’ve explained in Chapter 3, cognitive dissonance: To recap, we view people in a manner that is consistent with our previous existing stereotypes, whether it is positive or negative. If I think you’re an arrogant jerk, everything you do will be filtered through that perception. If you do something wonderful and saintly, I will regard it as the exception to the rule; you’re still an arrogant jerk. Within that framework it’s almost impossible for us to be perceived as improving, no matter how hard we try.

The larger number of choices were good for getting people’s attention, but were ultimately far worse for sales.2 In a study on how people select pension funds, when 95 funds were offered, about 60 percent of people participated, but when only 2 funds were offered, the rate of participation jumped to 75 percent.3 When Procter & Gamble reduced the number of Head & Shoulders products from 26 to 15, they saw a 10 percent increase in sales.4 Often it is better to offer fewer choices.
Although we want more information, when we have two or more conflicting ideas in our head, we become overwhelmed. This is known as cognitive dissonance and we often experience it when shopping. When this happens, we often pick the option that matches our current beliefs, and disregard all other options without evaluating them properly. When we buy things, in particular expensive things, we often feel discomfort after the purchase because we’re not sure if the purchase was a good decision. Instead of returning the item, we’re much more likely to reduce the dissonance by telling everyone how great the purchase was, and convincing ourselves in the process.

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When we’re sad or scared we want what’s familiar and will avoid what’s new.8
How to change people’s habits
We often use advertising to try to persuade people that there are better alternatives to what they currently do. Yet, presenting them with evidence that what they currently do is a bad choice is one of the worst ways to change people’s behavior or attitude. At best, this has little influence, as we automatically ignore information counter to our beliefs. At worst, the conflicting evidence brings about cognitive dissonance, and because we don’t like to hold opposing views in our head, we become more ingrained in what we believed before.
It’s incredibly hard to change people’s attitudes. It’s much easier to invoke behavioral change first, and then attitudinal change later. Changes in behavior almost always lead to changes in attitude. But before people will change their behavior, they have to be ready to try something new.

The tailgater persuades himself, and perhaps others, that his success is the result of his skilful driving. Crashes occur (the accident rate on French roads is so high that a French transport minister notoriously appealed to his compatriots to drive ‘comme les anglais’). But an element of cognitive dissonance creeps into accounts of the crash. The accident victim blames someone else for his misfortune: usually with some justification. The accidents that result from tailgating are triggered by some other immediate cause – an obstruction on the road, a mistake by another driver. The same cognitive dissonance enabled many bankers to persuade themselves – and some others – that the global financial crisis was not caused by their imprudent behaviour.
The distribution of returns from tailgating shows a high probability of small gain and a low probability of large loss.

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What was lost, in the end, was mostly other people’s money. By 2007–8 it became apparent that even the most senior tranche of a package of mortgages sold to people who were in default and whose houses were difficult to sell was likely to be worth very little.
The story of that collapse has been told in detail in many places.6 Mozilo would settle charges levelled against him by the SEC with a payment of $67.5 million. With the cognitive dissonance of the tailgater, he would explain that the considerably larger amount he had received for his services as chief executive of Countrywide was justified by the profits that his company had reported from the sale of mortgages before the borrowers failed to pay them back. I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.
With the decline of thrifts, bank examiners had assumed the role formerly played by the Office of Thrift Supervision (although this famously incompetent regulator continued in existence and AIG Financial Products, issuer of credit default swaps, discovered a loophole that enabled it to operate under the Office’s feeble oversight).

To be sure they hedge their bets with green‐sounding invocations and aim for sustainable development, but can this do more than the prayers they offer in Parliament?
I am not a contrarian; instead I greatly respect the climate scientists of the IPCC and would prefer to accept as true their conclusions about future climates. I do not enjoy argument for its own sake but I cannot ignore the large differences that exist between their predictions and what is observed.
In human affairs we know that ‘he who hesitates is lost’; social scientists talk of ‘cognitive dissonance’, which the composer of the phrase, Leon Festinger, defined as the feeling of discomfort we feel when trying to hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously and the urge to reduce the dissonance by modifying or rejecting one of the ideas. It operates when we choose between two almost equal objects and, having chosen, invest our choice with superlative advantage over the alternative so that we can happily reject it.

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The decision process must be part of our genetic inheritance; we need that certainty in human transactions. We have to choose and then have faith in our choice; this applies to the jobs we take, how we vote, the purchases we make, and the marriages to which we commit ourselves. It applies also to a judge or jury, but it is worse than useless in science. However, scientists are human and we never entirely escape the pull of cognitive dissonance.
The range of forecasts by the different models of the IPCC is so large that it is difficult to believe that they are reliable enough to be used by governments to plan policy for ameliorating climate change. It is a brave try at an exceedingly difficult scientific task and probably we are expecting too much from them: it would be wrong to expect the view of the panel to be truly authoritative.

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(If you are curious to know more about this side of my life it is in my autobiography Homage to Gaia.)
This third component of my knowledge base has taught me that above all humans hate any conspicuous change in their daily way of life and view of the future. As Bertrand Russell put it, ‘The average man would rather face death or torture than think.’ The overwhelming wish to continue with business as usual applies far beyond the marketplace and may be a consequence of the cognitive dissonance I wrote about earlier. Business as usual is unfortunately how most of science is done even though we know that it has no place in science’s probabilistic world. For practical and administrative reasons we cannot suddenly change the direction of research of a large and expensive laboratory built around a costly assembly of instruments, computers and specialized staff; this may be part of the reason why our forecasts do not agree well with expectations drawn from the history of the Earth.

So opens Leon Festinger’s account of these events in When Prophecy Fails, first published in 1956 and a seminal text in social psychology to this day. “Tell him you disagree and he turns away,” Festinger continues. “Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.”
It’s easy to scoff at the story of Mrs. Martin and her believers, but the phenomenon Festinger describes is one that none of us are immune to. “Cognitive dissonance,” he coined it. When reality clashes with our deepest convictions, we’d rather recalibrate reality than amend our worldview. Not only that, we become even more rigid in our beliefs than before.1
Mind you, we tend to be quite flexible when it comes to practical matters. Most of us are even willing to accept advice on how to remove a grease stain or chop a cucumber. No, it’s when our political, ideological, or religious ideas are at stake that we get the most stubborn.

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When just one other person in the group stuck to the truth, the test subjects were more likely to trust the evidence of their own senses. Let this be an encouragement to all those who feel like a lone voice crying out in the wilderness: Keep on building those castles in the sky. Your time will come.
Long Was the Night
In 2008, it seemed as if that time had finally come when we were confronted with the biggest case of cognitive dissonance since the 1930s. On September 15, the investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Suddenly, the whole global banking sector seemed poised to tumble like a row of dominoes. In the months that followed, one free market dogma after another crashed and burned.
Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, once dubbed the “Oracle” and the “Maestro,” was gobsmacked. “Not only have individual financial institutions become less vulnerable to shocks from underlying risk factors,” he had confidently asserted in 2004, “but also the financial system as a whole has become more resilient.”9 When Greenspan retired in 2006, everyone assumed he would be immortalized in history’s financial hall of fame.

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On Wall Street, bankers are seeing the highest bonus payments since the crash.12 And the banks’ capital buffers are as minuscule as ever. Joris Luyendijk, a journalist at The Guardian who spent two years looking under the hood of London’s financial sector, summed up the experience in 2013 as follows: “It’s like standing at Chernobyl and seeing they’ve restarted the reactor but still have the same old management.”13
You have to wonder: Was the cognitive dissonance from 2008 even big enough? Or was it too big? Had we invested too much in our old convictions? Or were there simply no alternatives?
This last possibility is the most worrying of all.
The word “crisis” comes from ancient Greek and literally means to “separate” or “sieve.” A crisis, then, should be a moment of truth, the juncture at which a fundamental choice is made. But it almost seems that back in 2008 we were unable to make that choice.

And, once again, just as the Tufts review would have predicted, most of the nine pounds came off in the first six months, and most of the participants were gaining weight back after a year. No wonder obesity is so rarely cured. Eating less—that is, undereating—simply doesn’t work for more than a few months, if that.
This reality, however, hasn’t stopped the authorities from recommending the approach, which makes reading such recommendations an exercise in what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance,” the tension that results from trying to hold two incompatible beliefs simultaneously.
Take, for instance, the Handbook of Obesity, a 1998 textbook edited by three of the most prominent authorities in the field—George Bray, Claude Bouchard, and W. P. T. James. “Dietary therapy remains the cornerstone of treatment and the reduction of energy intake continues to be the basis of successful weight reduction programs,” the book says.

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But it then states, a few paragraphs later, that the results of such energy-reduced restricted diets “are known to be poor and not long-lasting.” So why is such an ineffective therapy the cornerstone of treatment? The Handbook of Obesity neglects to say.
The latest edition (2005) of Joslin’s Diabetes Mellitus, a highly respected textbook for physicians and researchers, is a more recent example of this cognitive dissonance. The chapter on obesity was written by Jeffrey Flier, an obesity researcher who is now dean of Harvard Medical School, and his wife and research colleague, Terry Maratos-Flier. The Fliers also describe “reduction of caloric intake” as “the cornerstone of any therapy for obesity.” But then they enumerate all the ways in which this cornerstone fails. After examining approaches from the most subtle reductions in calories (eating, say, one hundred calories less each day with the hope of losing a pound every five weeks) to low-calorie diets of eight hundred to one thousand calories a day to very low-calorie diets (two hundred to six hundred calories) and even total starvation, they conclude that “none of these approaches has any proven merit.”

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That the official embrace of low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets coincided not with a national decline in weight and heart disease but with epidemics of both obesity and diabetes (both of which increase heart disease risk), should make any reasonable person question the underlying assumptions of the advice. But that’s not how people tend to think when confronted with evidence that one of their long-held beliefs is wrong. It’s not how we typically deal with cognitive dissonance. It’s certainly not how institutions and governments do it.
For the moment, I’ll just say that the obesity/heart-disease link, combined with the obesity and diabetes epidemics that began more or less coincidentally with the advice to eat less fat, less saturated fat, and more carbohydrates, is a good reason to doubt that it’s the fat and the saturated fat that we have to worry about.
Another reason to question the belief that saturated fat is bad for our health is that experimental evidence in support of the idea has always been surprisingly hard to come by.

“High protein levels can be bad for the kidneys,” said Silverman. “High fat is bad for your heart. Now Reaven is saying not to eat high carbohydrates. We have to eat something.” “Sometimes we wish it would go away,” Silverman added, “because nobody knows how to deal with it.”
This is what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, or the tension that results from trying to hold two incompatible beliefs simultaneously. When the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn discussed cognitive dissonance in scientific research—“the awareness of an anomaly in the fit between theory and nature”—he suggested that scientists will typically do what they have invariably done in the past in such cases: “They will devise numerous articulations and ad hoc modifications of their theory in order to eliminate any apparent conflict.”

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And because dietary carbohydrates and particularly refined carbohydrates elevate blood sugar and insulin and, presumably, induce insulin resistance, the implication is that eating these carbohydrates increases heart-disease risk not only in diabetics but in healthy individuals. By this reasoning, the atherogenic American diet is a carbohydrate-rich diet. Hence, cognitive dissonance.
The logic of this argument has to be taken one step further, however, even if the cognitive dissonance is elevated with it. Both diabetes and metabolic syndrome are associated with an elevated incidence of virtually every chronic disease, not just heart disease. Moreover, the diabetic condition is associated with a host of chronic blood-vessel-related problems known as vascular complications: stroke, a stroke-related dementia called vascular dementia, kidney disease, blindness, nerve damage in the extremities, and atheromatous disease in the legs that often leads to amputation.

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This offers yet another reason to believe the carbohydrate hypothesis of heart disease, since metabolic syndrome is now considered perhaps the dominant heart-disease risk factor—a “coequal partner to cigarette smoking as contributors to premature [coronary heart disease],” as the National Cholesterol Education Program describes it—and both triglycerides and HDL cholesterol are influenced by carbohydrate consumption far more than by any fat.
Nonetheless, when small, dense LDL and metabolic syndrome officially entered the orthodox wisdom as risk factors for heart disease in 2002, the cognitive dissonance was clearly present. First the National Cholesterol Education Program published its revised guidelines for cholesterol testing and treatment. This was followed in 2004 by two conference reports: one describing the conclusions of a joint NIH-AHA meeting on scientific issues related to metabolic syndrome, and the other, in which the American Diabetes Association joined in as well, describing joint treatment guidelines.

But her general thrust remains much the same – in fact, she adds a few more ways in which technology will definitely improve the world, such as in the developing world.
18.Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson (2005).
19.Selective exposure goes back to work by seminal psychologist Leon Festinger (1957), who posited the idea of cognitive dissonance – the discomfort people feel when presented with contradictory information. Selective exposure occurs when, in a bid to avoid cognitive dissonance, people tend to seek only information that confirms their beliefs.
20.Van Alstyne and Brynjolfsson (2005).
21.Stecklow (2005).
22.Mukul (2006); Raina and Timmons (2011).
23.A phablet is bigger than a smartphone, but smaller than a tablet.
24.That the digital divide is a symptom of other socioeconomic divides was astutely noted about telecenters by Economist (2005).

See Bargh and Chartrand (1999) and Schwarz (2004) for more on the importance of “fluency.”
15. See Nickerson (1998) for a review of confirmation bias. See Bond et al. (2007) for an example of confirmation bias in evaluating consumer products. See Marcus (2008, pp. 53–57) for a discussion of motivated reasoning versus confirmation bias. Both biases are also closely to related to the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957; Harmon-Jones and Mills 1999) according to which individuals actively seek to reconcile conflicting beliefs (“The car I just bought was more expensive than I can really afford” versus “The car I just bought is awesome”) by exposing themselves selectively to information that supports one view or discredits the other.
16. See Dennett (1984).
17. According to the philosopher Jerry Fodor (2006), the crux of the frame problem derives from the “local” nature of computation, which—at least as currently understood—takes some set of parameters and conditions as given, and then applies some sort of operation on these inputs that generates an output.

There was still a story being told, but the story was out of the government’s—or its propagandists’—control. If anything, the story that the television news was telling ended up more accurate than the one President Johnson’s staff was feeding him. The cognitive dissonance between the stories we were trying to tell ourselves about who we were as a nation and a people began conflicting with the stories that we were watching on TV. In a world still organized by stories, news about Vietnam atrocities and Watergate crimes can only mean there are bad people who need to be punished.
This cognitive dissonance amounted to a mass adolescence for America: the stories we were being told about who we were and what we stood for had turned out to be largely untrue. And like any adolescent, we felt ready to go out and see the world for ourselves.

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When a person’s head nods and his irises dilate, we know—even just subconsciously—that he agrees with us. This activates the mirror neurons in our brains, feeding us a bit of positive reinforcement, releasing a bit of dopamine, and leading us further down that line of thought.
Without such organic cues, we try to rely on the re-Tweets and likes we get—even though we have not evolved over hundreds of millennia to respond to those symbols the same way. So, again, we are subjected to the cognitive dissonance between what we are being told and what we are feeling. It just doesn’t register in the same way. We fall out of sync.
We cannot orchestrate human activity the same way a chip relegates tasks to the nether regions of its memory. We are not intellectually or emotionally equipped for it, and altering ourselves to become so simply undermines the contemplation and connection of which we humans are uniquely capable.

The second group was composed of investors who belonged to the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII), an organization of mostly nonprofessional investors who enjoy learning about the markets. This group was deemed to be more knowledgeable about investment matters than the architects. They overestimated their past performance by 3.4 percentage points.9
The overall results are consistent with the theory of cognitive dissonance. Investors would rather alter the facts than admit they have no special investment skills. This makes it difficult to fix flawed investment strategies.
Selective Memory as a Profession
Wall Street has turned cognitive dissonance into a business model. Have you ever heard a brokerage firm ever say they were wrong about an investment recommendation? Their analysts say they were early or late on a call, but never wrong. And you’d be hard-pressed to find advisors who admit their mutual fund selections underperformed the markets over the years.

Never.” At least not since college, when she was not as good at reading the signals. “I started to think about it,” she said, lounging back on her friend’s couch, putting her socked feet up on the coffee table. “What do I need a man for? I don’t need him financially. I don’t need him to do activities. I have lots of friends here. So fuck it.”
One problem I had with our conversation was the cognitive dissonance produced by the difference between the voice and the person: The distinctive thing about Sabrina is her effortless, natural beauty. It’s hard to describe her physically without resorting to Nancy Drew–era clichés such as “youthful” and “fresh.” She is half Asian, with creamy skin and long black hair and clear green eyes. On the day I met her she was wearing an outfit that Katniss, the heroine from The Hunger Games, might wear to go hunting: jeans and what looked like a boy’s flannel checked button-down shirt, with no makeup.

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The top still looks male, so women who make it that far still seem like an anomaly. In fact, they are seen as violating some essential quality of femininity—warmth, maternal instinct, communal feeling. Deep down we—men and women both—are not gender blind. We still expect women to act one way and men to act another. More than that, men and women both resist thinking any differently because it causes too much confusion and cognitive dissonance. We can glimpse the massive paradigm shift just on the horizon but we are not quite ready for it—a resistance that will fade as more and more women reach visible positions of power.
IN 2008, at a time when Citigroup was becoming a model of big bank failure and corruption, its top executives held their regular Monday morning meeting. Vikram Pandit, the bank’s new CEO, was about to roll out a controversial new management structure that would shift around control over various geographical territories.

Put another way, we essentially move the goalposts in our arguments to meet our needs and conclusions while ignoring contrary data, even if there’s plenty of it. People who use motivated reasoning respond defensively to contrary evidence. They actively discredit such evidence or its source without logical or evidentiary justification. It’s confirmation bias to the extreme.
Why do we defend obvious falsehoods? It can’t be just to always feel as if we’re right. Social scientists posit that our desire to avoid “cognitive dissonance,” as they call it, drives motivated reasoning. In other words, self-delusion feels good.
Dan Kahan is a professor of law at Yale Law School. He explains a classic example of motivated reasoning by describing an experiment done in the 1950s when psychologists asked students from two Ivy League universities to watch a film that featured a set of controversial calls made by referees during a football game.3 The game happened to be between teams from their respective schools.

One useful rule of thumb is to give positive support to the human beings on the other side equal in strength to the vigor with which you emphasize the problem. This combination of support and attack may seem inconsistent. Psychologically, it is; the inconsistency helps make it work. A well-known theory of psychology, the theory of cognitive dissonance, holds that people dislike inconsistency and will act to eliminate it. By attacking a problem, such as speeding trucks on a neighborhood street, and at the same time giving the company representative positive support, you create cognitive dissonance for him. To overcome this dissonance, he will be
30
tempted to dissociate himself from the problem in order to join you in doing something about it.
Fighting hard on the substantive issues increases the pressure for an effective solution; giving support to the human beings on the other side tends to improve your relationship and to increase the likelihood of reaching agreement.

He said, ”If we can’t unlock the phones, that means that everyone has a Swiss bank account in their pocket." That is not entirely accurate. I don’t have a Swiss bank account in my pocket. I have a Swiss bank, with the ability to generate 2 billion addresses off a single seed and use a different address for every transaction. That bank is completely encrypted, so even if you do unlock the phone, I still have access to my bank. That represents the cognitive dissonance between the powers of centralized secrecy and the power of privacy as a human right that we now have within our grasp. If you think this is going to be easy or that it’s going to be without struggle, you’re very mistaken.
3.10. Bitcoin, the Zombie of Currencies
If you read anything about bitcoin, you’ll see the very same things that they said about the internet in the early '90s.

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They will treat you in such a way as if you are idiots and try to persuade you that this is something to fear. When people hear that message, maybe the next day they come to one of these meetups and they meet a dentist who owns bitcoin, an architect who owns bitcoin, a taxi driver who uses bitcoin to send money back to their family—normal people who use bitcoin to give themselves financial power and financial freedom. Every time that message is broken by cognitive dissonance, bitcoin wins. All bitcoin really has to do is survive. So far, it’s doing pretty well.
3.11. Currencies Evolve
In the new network-centric world, currencies occupy evolutionary niches. They evolve, like species, based on the stimulus they have from their environment. Bitcoin is a dynamic system with software developers that can change it. The question is, in which direction will bitcoin evolve?

pages: 198words: 52,089

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It
by
Richard V. Reeves

The problem is that many of these efforts are likely to run into the solid wall of upper middle-class resistance, even those that simply require a slightly higher tax bill. A change of heart is needed: a recognition of privilege among the upper middle class. That’s one reason I have written this book, in the hope that it can help to hold up a mirror. Some of us in the upper middle class already feel a degree of cognitive dissonance about the advantages we pile up for our own kids, compared to the truncated opportunities we know exist for others. We want our children to do well, but also want to live in a fairer society. My friend and colleague E. J. Dionne put it to me this way: “I spend my weekdays decrying the problem of inequality, but then I spend my evenings and weekends adding to it.”
After describing the theme of this book to colleagues and friends, the conversation has often taken a confessional turn.

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When the daughter of a liberal columnist failed to make it into a highly selective private school, he called a well-placed friend who called a family member who happens to run the school. Then she got in. Each of these individuals is thoughtful and liberal enough to know, at some level, their actions were morally wrong. In each case, their actions conferred an unfair advantage.
If more of us start to feel Dionne’s cognitive dissonance, some political space might open up for the kind of reforms I discuss at the end of this book. These make some demands of the upper middle class, not least when it comes to paying for them. The big question is whether we are willing to make some modest sacrifices in order to expand opportunities for others or whether, deep down, we would rather pull up the ladder.
As he put the final touches to a book, the historian James Truslow Adams was pleased with his idea for the title: The American Dream.

The drive to present the self in a positive light was one of the major findings of 20th-century social psychology. An early exposé was the sociologist Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and recent summaries include Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson’s Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me), Robert Trivers’s Deceit and Self-Deception, and Robert Kurzban’s Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite.23 Among the signature phenomena are cognitive dissonance, in which people change their evaluation of something they have been manipulated into doing to preserve the impression that they are in control of their actions, and the Lake Wobegon Effect (named after Garrison Keillor’s fictitious town in which all the children are above average), in which a majority of people rate themselves above average in every desirable talent or trait.24
Self-serving biases are part of the evolutionary price we pay for being social animals.

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In the examples I mentioned in introducing the Moralization Gap, perpetrators rationalize a harm they committed out of self-interested motives (reneging on a promise, robbing or raping a victim). But people also rationalize harms they have been pressured into committing in the service of someone else’s motives. They can edit their beliefs to make the action seem justifiable to themselves, the better to justify it to others. This process is called cognitive dissonance reduction, and it is a major tactic of self-deception.285 Social psychologists like Milgram, Zimbardo, Baumeister, Leon Festinger, Albert Bandura, and Herbert Kelman have documented that people have many ways of reducing the dissonance between the regrettable things they sometimes do and their ideal of themselves as moral agents.286
One of them is euphemism—the reframing of a harm in words that somehow make it feel less immoral.

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The better angels that subdue these demons are the topic of the next chapter. Yet the mere process of identifying our inner demons may be a first step to bringing them under control.
The second half of the 20th century was an age of psychology. Academic research increasingly became a part of the conventional wisdom, including dominance hierarchies, the Milgram and Asch experiments, and the theory of cognitive dissonance. But it wasn’t just scientific psychology that filtered into public awareness; it was the general habit of seeing human affairs through a psychological lens. This half-century saw the growth of a species-wide self-consciousness, encouraged by literacy, mobility, and technology: the way the camera follows us in slow-mo, the way we look to us all. Increasingly we see our affairs from two vantage points: from inside our skulls, where the things we experience just are, and from a scientist’s-eye view, where the things we experience consist of patterns of activity in an evolved brain, with all its illusions and fallacies.

The man responsible for this strange and illuminating idea was neither a doctor nor a scientist by trade. Born in Hertfordshire in 1702, Thomas Bayes was a clergyman and philosopher who served as the minister at the chapel in Tunbridge Wells, near London. He published only two significant papers in his lifetime—the first, a defense of God, and the second, a defense of Newton’s theory of calculus (it was a sign of the times that in 1732, a clergyman found no cognitive dissonance between these two efforts). His best-known work—on probability theory—was not published during his lifetime and was only rediscovered decades after his death.
The statistical problem that concerned Bayes requires a sophisticated piece of mathematical reasoning. Most of Bayes’s mathematical compatriots were concerned with problems of pure statistics: If you have a box of twenty-five white balls and seventy-five black balls, say, what is the chance of drawing two black balls in a row?

Sharing information, no matter how trivial, solidifies societal bonds and deepens relationships. These shared points of reference make up life as much as our inside jokes at work or gossip at church.
Clay Shirky has made waves in the last few years as being a kind of Marshall McLuhan for the Web 2.0 era. Throughout his two books, Cognitive Dissonance and Here Comes Everybody, Shirky provides the kind of commentary that fills one with excitement for being a part of the web right now. We’re making things happen! It’s a new stage in human social evolution! Look at all the cool stuff the Internet lets us do!
In Cognitive Dissonance, Shirky uses the lolcats found at http://www.icanhascheezburger.com as a convenient representative for what he calls “the stupidest possible creative act,” as opposed to, say, improving a Wikipedia entry or creating a platform for financing human rights projects in the third world.

This also ties in seamlessly with the reduction of science to scientism: all results must be generalisable, based on objective and value-free research using accepted methods, independent of context. I shall confine myself to two observations. The selection of certain symptoms — increasingly, of certain behaviour — as indicators of mental illness is far from value-free; rather, the reverse. And the majority of research findings may be, as we know, refuted by other findings, but this is ignored by the dominant paradigm. The psychological explanation for this is known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. As far as the DSM is concerned: with the best will in the world, the scientific underpinning for its approach is extremely weak.
The reason that so little attention is paid to the failure of current psychiatric diagnostics is thus fairly straightforward: the dominant paradigm allows no other viewpoint. The reason that labelling is such a success takes a bit more untangling. It has to do with the prevailing conviction that everyone can (and must) make a success of their lives, and that everyone is responsible for their own success or failure.

…

The current emphasis on competency-oriented education is driving our youngsters straight into the competition-and-career cluster, with all the associated values following in their wake. What the advocates of the system fail to realise is that this automatically undermines other norms and values. There is no such thing as competitive solidarity.
Indeed, its impossibility is clearly illustrated by what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’. When you hold strongly to a particular value-laden cluster, you simply can’t take in information that contradicts it, however objective and factual. Someone who sets great store by solidarity, public-spiritedness, and spirituality will find it almost impossible to take in information about the advantages of individualism, competitiveness, and materialism. And vice versa. We are all familiar with this phenomenon, by the way.

And even more than that, it can allow us to anticipate the shortcomings in what we each might know and help us to plan for these flaws in our knowledge.
Facts are how we organize and interpret our surroundings. No one learns something new and then holds it entirely independent of what they already know. We incorporate it into the little edifice of personal knowledge that we have been creating in our minds our entire lives. In fact, we even have a phrase for the state of affairs that occurs when we fail to do this: cognitive dissonance.
Ordering our surroundings is the rule of how we as humans operate. In childhood we give names to our toys, and in adulthood we give names to our species, chemical elements, asteroids, and cities. By naming, or, more broadly, by categorizing, we are creating an order to an otherwise chaotic and frightening world.
And when we learn facts, we are doing the same thing. Facts—whether about our surroundings, the current state of knowledge, or even ourselves—provide us with a sense of control and a sense of comfort.

They found that after giving a short lecture about the benefits of a certain drug, the speaker would begin to believe his own words and soon prescribe accordingly. Psychological studies show that we quickly and easily start believing whatever comes out of our own mouths, even when the original reason for expressing the opinion is no longer relevant (in the doctors’ case, that they were paid to say it). This is cognitive dissonance at play; doctors reason that if they are telling others about a drug, it must be good—and so their own beliefs change to correspond to their speech, and they start prescribing accordingly.
The reps told us that they employed other tricks too, turning into chameleons—switching various accents, personalities, and political affiliations on and off. They prided themselves on their ability to put doctors at ease.

One in twenty households could not afford to feed their children properly.120 Last year, almost two-fifths of teachers said they had seen children who had not had enough to eat turning up for lessons.121 Another recent poll found that nearly half of teachers had taken food in to school to feed ravenous pupils.122
Against this backdrop, all talk of meritocracy brings to mind Richard Tawney’s characterisation of those who preach equality of opportunity while ‘[resisting] most strenuously attempts to apply it’.123 Here is located the fissure on the left between those who genuinely seek to create a socially mobile society and those who pay lip service to it while pursuing policies antithetical to a meritocratic order. Because New Labour’s verbal commitment to social mobility lacked a corresponding drive to reduce inequality, its rhetoric gave off a strong whiff of cognitive dissonance. Thus, after thirteen years of Labour governments, Britain remained a society dominated by the privileged and, invariably, the children of the privileged. If social mobility was not notably worse in 2010 than it was in 1997, it was not demonstrably better either. The acceptance by New Labour of large inequalities of wealth, buttressed by the radical-sounding mantra of equality of opportunity, produced a society in which the odds remained firmly stacked against those from poorer homes.

If you assume, as I had, that human beings are fundamentally logical creatures, this obsessive preoccupation with a theory that has for all intents and purposes been disproved is hard to fathom. But when it comes to decisions around emotionally charged topics, logic often takes a back seat to what are called cognitive biases—essentially a set of unconscious mechanisms that convince us that it is our feelings about a situation and not the facts that represent the truth. One of the better known of these biases is the theory of cognitive dissonance, which was developed by the social psychologist Leon Festinger in the 1950s. In his classic book When Prophecy Fails, Festinger used the example of millennial cults in the days after the prophesied moment of reckoning as an illustration of “disconfirmed” expectations producing counterintuitive results:
Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong; what will happen?

…

Some of the others have been alluded to earlier in this book: When SafeMinds members set out to write an academic paper about a hypothesis they already believed to be true, they set themselves up for expectation bias, where a researcher’s initial conjecture leads to the manipulation of data or the misinterpretation of results, and selection bias, where the meaning of data is distorted by the way in which it was collected. In addition to being a natural reaction to the experience of cognitive dissonance, the hardening conviction on the part of vaccine denialists in the face of studies that undercut their theories is an example of the anchoring effect, which occurs when we give too much weight to the past when making decisions about the future, and of irrational escalation, which is when we base how much energy we’ll devote to something on our previous investment and discount new evidence indicating we were likely wrong.

After being fed an upbeat outlook by corporations for many years, analysts had no idea how to interpret the downbeat news, so most just ignored it.
The propensity to shut out bad news was even more pronounced
among analysts in the Internet sector. Many were so convinced that
these stocks were the wave of the future that, despite the flood of ghastly
news, many downgraded these stocks only after they had fallen 80 or 90
percent!
The predisposition to disregard news that does not correspond to
one’s worldview is called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is
the discomfort we encounter when we confront evidence that conflicts
with our view or suggests that our abilities or actions are not as a good
as we thought. We all display a natural tendency to minimize this discomfort, which makes it difficult for us to recognize our overconfidence.
Prospect Theory, Loss Aversion, and Holding On to Losing Trades
Dave: I see. Can we talk about individual stocks?

For an audiovisual summary of the paper, see Killingworth’s TED talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy5A8dVYU3k (the TED talk can be accessed by Googling “Killingsworth TED talk”).
behavior affects attitude: This theoretical basis for this phenomenon is something called self-perception theory. The idea is that we infer our characteristics (attitudes, opinions, etc.) based on how we see ourselves behaving; see D. J. Bem, “Self-perception: An Alternative Interpretation of Cognitive Dissonance Phenomena,” Psychological Review 74(3) (1967): 183. See also a discussion of a related concept, the insufficient justification paradigm, discussed in R. E. Nisbett, and T. D. Wilson, “Telling More than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84(3) (1977): 231.
something called self-perception: Bem, “Self-perception.”
to make it a “happier brain”: S.

Similarly, vegetable production from the 50 million civilian ‘victory gardens’ is estimated to have exceeded that of commercial vegetable production.
These persuasive campaigns, and the behaviour they encouraged, had a dual function. They generated useful resources but, perhaps more importantly, they created a sense of common purpose. An everyday assumption is that attitudes shape behaviours. Yet psychological studies have shown that very often it works the other way around: behaviours shape attitudes.7 It is what psychologists call cognitive dissonance: when there is a discrepancy between a person’s attitudes and their behaviour, such as when you find yourself doing a ‘boring’ task for little reward, your attitude will often move into line with your behaviour (e.g. you conclude that the task is not so dull after all, and that it enables you to relax and clear your mind). Similarly, someone who has invested in a government war bond, or ‘dug for victory’, may be more likely to come to believe in the value and objectives of the war itself.

…

Chapter 1: Early Steps
1 One of the most basic psychological effects is how familiarity breeds liking, from random sequences of notes to how much we like and trust institutions.
2 I’m grateful to Rory Sutherland for first drawing my attention to the fascinating example of how Frederick the Great encouraged Prussians to adopt the potato.
3 Quoted in Quarterly Journal of Military History, August 2009.
4 UCLA Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health; http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/victoria.html.
5 The Rotherhithe Tunnel was opened around 1908, and today carries the A101 road from Limehouse to Rotherhithe. As its sharp turns are now considered dangerous, it has a speed limit of just 20 mph.
6 Heide, Robert, and Gilman, John, Home Front America: Popular Culture of the World War II Era. p.36 ISBN 0-8118-0927-7 OCLC 31207708.
7 Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. A classic illustration of the effect, was a study in which students had to do a boring, repetitive task, but were then paid either $1 or $20 to persuade someone in the waiting room that it was fun. When subsequently asked to rate the experiment, those paid just $1 were much more likely to rate it as interesting than those paid $20. Festinger argued that those paid the smaller sum restructured their beliefs in line with their behaviour: it must have been interesting, since I did it and told someone else it was interesting, just for a measly $1.

High off the optimism of the convincer, certain that good fortune is ours, we often take the second route. When we should be cutting our losses, we instead recommit—and that is entirely what the breakdown is meant to accomplish.
Leon Festinger first proposed the theory of cognitive dissonance, today one of the most famous concepts in psychology, in 1957. When we experience an event that counteracts a prior belief, he argued, the resulting tension is too much for us to handle; we can’t hold two opposing beliefs at the same time, at least not consciously. “The individual strives,” Festinger wrote in A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, “toward consistency within himself.” True, here and there one might find exceptions. But overall, “It is still overwhelmingly true that related opinions or attitudes are consistent with one another. Study after study reports such consistency among one person’s political attitudes, social attitudes, and many others.”

FRAMING SCIENCE
If it’s true that our brains process facts and Locke’s “but faith, or opinion” in essentially the same way, how can one ever hope to break through? The key lies in emphasizing the process, which granulates the frame from an authoritarian assertion to an antiauthoritarian exploration of the senses and intellect: “Look, see it yourself?” This has the same effect as Locke’s careful definition of knowledge: It removes science from a rhetorical frame conflict and refocuses the mind on observable reality, causing cognitive dissonance and questioning. When the evolution question is worded with the qualifier “according to the theory of evolution,” that emphasizes process. We could also ask it with the qualifier “according to observations of the fossil record” and would likely get a similar result. This is because science is a physical, objective subset of the broader worldviews that it was carved out from, and that’s okay.

…

Even people high in belief in a just world can handle these extremes if there’s a concrete solution. But without that, they find it paralyzing and are motivated to disregard the message.”23
SPEAKING CONSERVATESE
When the just world belief is held along with a high level of patriotism, this effect seems to be multiplied, Willer and Feinberg found in a follow-up study.24 “Conservatives are on average more patriotic,” says Willer. “One thing that sets up is a great deal of cognitive dissonance when it comes to global warming. You think America is great, you know it’s a greenhouse-gas emitter, and then you’re told that greenhouse gases are bad for the world.” They found that if you experimentally increase people’s patriotism, their belief in global warming tends to go down.
In other experiments, Feinberg and Willer found that liberals moralize environmental issues and conservatives don’t.25 So they wondered, “What if you tried to make conservatives think of global warming as a moral issue?

…

Win or lose, Sanders puts a face on science and elevates it in the discussion. Sometimes this process can take years to have an impact. But eventually, it does.
“I went to the county fairs and I’d meet lots of people,” relates Sanders. “A not infrequent response was ‘Oh, since you’re a scientist you probably believe in global warming.’ This was from people who didn’t. So there was this cognitive dissonance. They know that my being a scientist would make me think that global warming was real, and they both didn’t believe it themselves and thought that there was some dispute about it. And they would maintain the position that it’s an open scientific question. But in person at least, I didn’t feel like they were hostile to me. It’s hard to know how sustained you have to be.
“At Indiana county fairs there are a lot of church booths.

They overestimate their contribution to a joint effort, chalk up their successes to skill and their failures to luck, and always feel that the other side has gotten the better deal in a compromise.81 People keep up these self-serving illusions even when they are wired to what they think is an accurate lie-detector. This shows that they are not lying to the experimenter but lying to themselves. For decades every psychology student has learned about “cognitive disson Sance reduction,” in which people change whatever opinion it takes to maintain a positive self-image.82 The cartoonist Scott Adams illustrates it well:
Dilbert reprinted by permission of United Feature Syndicate, Inc.
If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophony of spoinks.
Self-deception is among the deepest roots of human strife and folly. It implies that the faculties that ought to allow us to settle our differences—seeking the truth and discussing it rationally—are miscalibrated so that all parties assess themselves to be wiser, abler, and nobler than they really are.

…

Among them I would include the following:
The primacy of family ties in all human societies and the consequent appeal of nepotism and inheritance.20
The limited scope of communal sharing in human groups, the more common ethos of reciprocity, and the resulting phenomena of social loafing and the collapse of contributions to public goods when reciprocity cannot be implemented.21
The universality of dominance and violence across human societies (including supposedly peaceable hunter-gatherers) and the existence of genetic and neurological mechanisms that underlie it.22
The universality of ethnocentrism and other forms of group-against-group hostility across societies, and the ease with which such hostility can be aroused in people within our own society.23
The partial heritability of intelligence, conscientiousness, and antisocial tendencies, implying that some degree of inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems, and that we therefore face an inherent tradeoff between equality and freedom.24
The prevalence of defense mechanisms, self-serving biases, and cognitive dissonance reduction, by which people deceive themselves about their autonomy, wisdom, and integrity.25
The biases of the human moral sense, including a preference for kin and friends, a susceptibility to a taboo mentality, and a tendency to confuse morality with conformity, rank, cleanliness, and beauty.26
It is not just conventional scientific data that tell us the mind is not infinitely malleable.

A survey of law school students published in 2003 by economists Kip Viscusi and Richard Zeckhauser in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, however, found that around 40 percent of respondents believed their personal risk assessment was higher before the attacks than currently.2 In another study of professional-school students and undergraduate business students in 2005, they showed that over two-thirds of respondents exhibited the same phenomenon.3 These respondents experienced a recollection bias, whereby after the occurrence of a low-probability event, one thinks that one’s prior risk assessment was much higher than it actually was. This could be due to an attempt to reduce cognitive dissonance, for self-justification, or simply to misremembering.
It may also be a variant of hindsight bias, in which knowing the outcome alters an individual’s assessment of how likely it was to have occurred. For example, in a 1975 study by psychologist Baruch Fischhoff, who is also a contributor to this book, subjects were given passages to read about the Gurkha raids on the British in the early 1800s.

…

From an economic perspective this faith is unfounded, and Friedman in his role as a scholar was aware of this fact and even alluded to it in footnotes. But his followers were not aware of it, and are still not. From the perspective of an ardent free-marketer, environmental problems are a threat: They require government intervention in the economy. It’s hard to believe both that we need to solve environmental problems and that the government is the problem and not the solution! Believing both leads to cognitive dissonance. Many conservatives ignore environmental problems, pretending that they don’t exist. Roosevelt and Nixon did not have this conflict: In their day, conservatism was consistent with a role for the government.
Compounding this ideological change is an empirical one: the rise of climate change as an issue. Climate change threatens the fossil fuel industry, the oil, coal, and gas industries.

Oakland simply did what any self-respecting city does with such disfiguring blots on its honor: it occasionally sends the police out to chase them away and then it ignores them when they come back. And it longed for that plaza to be clean and picturesque in the way a good plaza should be: empty of people.
But hey, did you see what I did there? I was talking about rats, and then suddenly I was talking about human beings. Did you notice it when you were reading it? Did you feel any cognitive dissonance? What kind of cognitive dissonance did you feel?
If you didn’t, it’s probably because ‘rats’ and ‘vermin’ is a common way of talking and thinking about this country’s underclass, the human beings who, because they sell drugs or don’t have a stable home, don’t quite seem like the sort of people we have to care about. They seem dirty. We might even let ourselves get stupid enough to imagine them as parasites (as if we ever gave them anything).

For instance, when the Eiffel Tower was first erected, Parisians hated it. They thought it was a half-finished skeletal blight on their fair city, and they responded with a frenzy of protest. But as time went by, public opinion evolved from hatred to acceptance to adoration. The mere exposure principle assures us that a change effort that initially feels unwelcome and foreign will gradually be perceived more favorably as people grow accustomed to it.
Also, cognitive dissonance works in your favor. People don’t like to act in one way and think in another. So once a small step has been taken, and people have begun to act in a new way, it will be increasingly difficult for them to dislike the way they’re acting. Similarly, as people begin to act differently, they’ll start to think of themselves differently, and as their identity evolves, it will reinforce the new way of doing things.

…

The “verbal grooming” quotation and other details are from an interview between Dan Heath and Amy Sutherland in January 2008.
Psychologist Alan Kazdin. See Kazdin (2008), The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child: With No Pills, No Therapy, No Contest of Wills, New York: Houghton Mifflin. The quotations are from p. 34.
Change isn’t an event; it’s a process. Chip Heath thanks Bo Brockman for teaching this idea.
Steven Kelman. On pp. 22–24, Kelman explains why mere exposure and cognitive dissonance may cause people to resist change. Then, in an insightful analysis on pp. 123–127, he shows how the same factors make change hard to stop once they get going. See Kelman (2005), Unleashing Change: A Study of Organizational Renewal in Government, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Acknowledgments
Some readers gave us feedback on an early draft of the text. You helped us separate the wheat from the chaff and also saved us from a major Clocky miscue.

Two-thirds of all drivers ‘rate themselves almost perfect in excellence as a driver (9 or 10 on a 10-point scale), while the rest consider themselves above average (6 to 8)’. In their own minds, they can’t put a wheel wrong when they’re on the road. As a consequence, while ‘70 per cent of drivers report being a victim of an aggressive driver’, only ‘30 per cent admit to being aggressive drivers’. Such mismatches between perception and reality suggest that cognitive dissonance rules the highways. Drivers operate in a parallel universe where they are perfect and everyone else is bad and dangerous.
The territoriality, belligerence, vindictiveness and, above all, double standards that typify road-rage sufferers have been investigated in depth. It’s now treated as a problem in its own right that claims hundreds of casualties each year, and is in urgent need of solution.

…

The OECD Well-Being Index of thirty-six countries also rates commuting badly. Denmark, which tops its chart, wins partly because average commutes in that country are very short, and 34 per cent of Danish workers travel to their offices by bike. This combination boosts its scores on three counts – health (bicycle commuters have a 28 per cent lower mortality rate than the population average), environment and ‘work/life balance’.
So are commuters all suffering from cognitive dissonance and, like smokers, addicted to a habit that will inevitably make them sick and possibly kill them? Some experts think so, and describe such blindness as a ‘weighting mistake’. We humans mess up our priorities: we invest our passions in trivia, and overlook important matters – we splash out on a new pair of shoes, and forget to pay our taxes. When it comes to commuting, we dream of having houses with gardens in the suburbs and sending our children to good schools, but forget that we’re spending a fortune on season tickets or fuel, and will seldom have time for our gardens or money to pay for private educations for our kids.

One suggestion is that lower temperatures during the ‘Little Ice Age’ of the late seventeenth century led to slower tree growth, producing denser wood with superior acoustic properties. Others believe Stradivarius added a secret ingredient to his varnish or used magically endowed wood from ancient churches.
The human tendency to experience expensive things as ‘better’ is driven by the psychological phenomenon known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. We become uncomfortable if reality doesn’t live up to our expectations, so we adjust reality accordingly. And it works. If people pay a higher price for an energy drink, like Red Bull, they are able to solve more brain-teasers afterwards than those who paid a lower price for the same drink. They expect the more expensive drink to be more effective, and their brains make reality conform to this expectation.

I’m no longer party to that collective guilt that keeps the third-chair cellist, the administrative secretary, the stock clerk, the not-really-all-that-attractive-but-she’s-black beauty pageant winner from showing up for work Monday morning and shooting every white motherfucker in the place. It’s a guilt that has obligated me to mutter “My bad” for every misplaced bounce pass, politician under federal investigation, every bug-eyed and Rastus-voiced comedian, and every black film made since 1968. But I don’t feel responsible anymore. I understand now that the only time black people don’t feel guilty is when we’ve actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief. In the way that cooning is a relief, voting Republican is a relief, marrying white is a relief—albeit a temporary one.
Uncomfortable with being so comfortable, I make one last attempt to be at one with my people. I close my eyes, place my head on the table, and bury my broad nose in the crook of my arm.

…

His grandmamma slaps him so hard she almost knocks him down. ‘Don’t you ever say that,’ she says. ‘Now what did you learn?’ The boy starts rubbing his cheek and says, ‘I learned that I’ve been white for only ten minutes and I hate you niggers already!’”
The kids couldn’t tell whether he was joking or just ranting, but they laughed anyway, each finding something funny in his expressions, his inflections, the cognitive dissonance in hearing the word “nigger” coming from the mouth of a man as old as the slur itself. Most of them had never seen his work. They just knew he was a star. That’s the beauty of minstrelsy—its timelessness. The soothing foreverness in the languid bojangle of his limbs, the rhythm of his juba, the sublime profundity of his jive as he ushered the kids into the farm, retelling his joke in Spanish to an uncaptive audience running past him, cups and thermoses in hand, scattering the damn chickens.

Among the causes for this extraordinary reversal of public opinion were the austerity policies implemented responsibly by the social democratic government in order to restore the economy; the pro-European Union stand of the governing coalition, in contrast to the nationalistic, xenophobic attitude of traditional Icelandic parties; and the resentment of the majority of the population against their deep indebtedness as a result of the mortgage crisis and the inefficiency of the government in resolving the debt crisis. But perhaps the main source of discontent was the cognitive dissonance between the hopes of the social movement and the grim reality of institutional politics, a recurrent theme in the history of social movements. As a result, the new parliament tabled the project of constitutional reform and one of the most daring experiments in constitutional democracy became yet another faded dream.
However, if the crisis of political legitimacy continues to expand throughout the world, and if citizens everywhere keep looking for inspiration in their search for real democracy, the cultural and technological bases for the deepening of representative democracy might have been laid out in a small country made of ice and fire on a North Atlantic island.

…

It benefitted to some extent from the opinion created by the Gezi movement, but it is usually perceived as a platform created by the Kurdish party to attract votes in the west of the country, and so it only obtained 2 percent of the votes at the ballot box as most of the non-Kurdish population would be suspicious of HDP’s attachment to Kurdish nationalism.
Confirming the pre-eminence of AKP in Turkish politics, the first presidential election held in 2014 after a constitutional change to establish a more presidential regime was easily won by Erdogan, the leader of AKP and the most direct adversary of the Gezi movement.
A number of reasons have been advanced to explain this cognitive dissonance between the popularity of the Gezi movement in June 2013 and the undisputed electoral success of AKP and Erdogan in 2014. Beyond specific circumstances that would require a complex analytical journey through the intricacies of Turkish politics, the most convincing explanation is the persistence of fundamental cleavages in the Turkish society that are fixed in rigid political alignments. These include the historically rooted hostility between secularism and religion (expressed in the opposition between CHP and AKP); the confrontation between nationalism (supported by the still Kemalist armed forces) and the pro-democracy movement that brings together the democratic aspirations of the middle class and the need of the Islamists to use democratic institutions as a protective shield against secularist armed forces; the significant split between the Turkish population, and particularly Turkish nationalism, and the Kurdish minority, in search for national autonomy and ultimately for independence.

Anyone who remembers the first dot-com bubble of the late 1990s is familiar with this kind of workspace. And though that bubble burst in the early 2000s, the aesthetic it spawned – which disguises work as play – remains popular. Does it make it easier to give up our leisure time when a meeting room is called a granny flat and designed in floral prints with easy chairs? What happens when work is going badly and a workspace that looks leisurely is suddenly a place of great stress? There is a cognitive dissonance in form and function here, perhaps the reason an event like brunch becomes such an overt act of leisure, even if in practice it isn’t leisurely.
Many other people don’t have anything resembling a workspace at all. Work happens everywhere now. Many of us work from home, or from actual cafés, freelance vagabonds who move from one rickety table to the next, renting the space with our coffee purchases, getting more wired as the day goes on.

On the other hand, the fact that societies are so enormously conservative with regard to institutions means that when the original conditions leading to the creation or adoption of an institution change, the institution fails to adjust quickly to meet the new circumstances. The disjunction in rates of change between institutions and the external environment then accounts for political decay or deinstitutionalization.
Legacy investments in existing institutions lead to failures not simply in changing outmoded institutions but also in the very ability to perceive that a failure has taken place. This phenomenon is described by social psychologists as “cognitive dissonance,” of which history is littered with examples. 18 If one society is getting more powerful militarily, or wealthier, as a result of superior institutions, members of a less competitive society have to correctly attribute those advantages to the underlying institutions if they are to have any hope of surviving. Social outcomes are inherently multicausal, however, and it is always possible to come up with alternative explanations for social weakness or failure that are plausible—but wrong.

…

The ministry has its own vision of how to manage the Japanese economy and at times has manipulated its political bosses rather than being subordinated by them. It is therefore often seen as a paradigmatic case of an autonomous institution. See Peter B. Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
18
Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962). See also Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts (New York: Mariner Books, 2008).
19
This is the argument made about twentieth-century Britain in Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). This book is based on the more general theory of collective action he outlined in The Logic of Collective Action.
20
Steven LeBlanc, private conversation.
21
See, for example, Bates, Prosperity and Violence; Bates, Greif, and Singh, “Organizing Violence”; North, Weingast, and Wallis, Violence and Social Orders.
30: POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT, THEN AND NOW
1
For background, see Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), chap. 1.

The Unarian cult, still going strong today, survived the nonappearance of an intergalactic spacefleet on September 27, 1975.
Why would a group belief become stronger after encountering crushing counterevidence?
The conventional interpretation of this phenomenon is based on cognitive dissonance. When people have taken “irrevocable” actions in the service of a belief—given away all their property in anticipation of the saucers landing—they cannot possibly admit they were mistaken. The challenge to their belief presents an immense cognitive dissonance; they must find reinforcing thoughts to counter the shock, and so become more fanatical. In this interpretation, the increased group fanaticism is the result of increased individual fanaticism.
I was looking at a Java applet which demonstrates the use of evaporative cooling to form a Bose-Einstein condensate, when it occurred to me that another force entirely might operate to increase fanaticism.

…

You may also think that making things illegal just makes them more expensive, that regulators will abuse their power, or that her individual freedom trumps your desire to meddle with her life. But, as a matter of simple fact, she’s still going to die.
We live in an unfair universe. Like all primates, humans have strong negative reactions to perceived unfairness; thus we find this fact stressful. There are two popular methods of dealing with the resulting cognitive dissonance. First, one may change one’s view of the facts—deny that the unfair events took place, or edit the history to make it appear fair. (This is mediated by the affect heuristic and the just-world fallacy.) Second, one may change one’s morality—deny that the events are unfair.
Some libertarians might say that if you go into a “banned products shop,” passing clear warning labels that say THINGS IN THIS STORE MAY KILL YOU, and buy something that kills you, then it’s your own fault and you deserve it.

…

Just shift downward a little, and wait for more evidence. If the theory is true, supporting evidence will come in shortly, and the probability will climb again. If the theory is false, you don’t really want it anyway.
The problem with using black-and-white, binary, qualitative reasoning is that any single observation either destroys the theory or it does not. When not even a single contrary observation is allowed, it creates cognitive dissonance and has to be argued away. And this rules out incremental progress; it rules out correct integration of all the evidence. Reasoning probabilistically, we realize that on average, a correct theory will generate a greater weight of support than countersupport. And so you can, without fear, say to yourself: “This is gently contrary evidence, I will shift my belief downward.” Yes, down. It does not destroy your cherished theory.

Self-reinforcing majorities grow larger, while isolated and dispirited minorities shrink. Majorities gain confidence in their opinions, which grow more extreme over time. As a result, misunderstanding between Republicans and Democrats grows as they seclude themselves.
Americans' political lives are baffling. Reconciling the narrowness of recent national elections with the lopsidedness of local results produces mass cognitive dissonance. The facts we see on television—a nearly fifty-fifty Congress, a teetering Electoral College, and presidential elections decided by teaspoons of votes—simply don't square with the overwhelming majorities we experience in our neighborhoods.
In focus groups held in Omaha, University of Nebraska political scientist Elizabeth Theiss-Morse revealed how confused people are by the consensus they see in their neighborhoods versus the conflict they see at large in the nation.

…

Two geographers studying the 2004 U.S. presidential election said that they were "motivated by the striking similarity between U.S. electoral polarization and [O'Loughlin's] finding of significant geographic variations of local populations' effects on the outcome of the critical Nazi vote " Ian Sue Wing and Joan Walker, "The 2004 Presidential Election from a Spatial Perspective" (unpublished paper, 2005)
[back]
***
*Another example of this is a 1951 experiment in which students at Princeton and Dartmouth watched a film of a football game between the two schools. The students were asked to take note of foul play. "Dartmouth students saw mostly Princeton's offenses; Princeton students saw mostly Dartmouth's," reported the Wall Street journal (Cynthia Crossen, '"Cognitive Dissonance' Became a Milestone in 1950s Psychology," Wall Street Journal, December 4, 2006, p. B1)
[back]
***
*In early 2007, when the Pew Research Center charted views of "traditional values" championed by the Republican Party, the polls showed an increasing number of Americans holding more liberal views on abortion and sexual orientation, for example. If Republicans have found their traditional base to be eroding, it may have something to do with the failures of George W Bush or the war in Iraq But the change is also the result of a post-materialist shift in American culture.

In Hue, Herr saw a dead Vietnamese man whose skull had been sheared off by shrapnel debris, so that the top of his head resembled an open flap loosely hinged to the back of his head. The image spooked him. “I knew that if I stayed here he would drift in over me that night, grinning and dripping, all rot and green-black bloat.” Herr now viewed Vietnam as a bifurcated war: “There are two Vietnams, the one that I’m up to my ass in here and the one perceived in the States by people who’ve never been here. They are mutually exclusive.”
Herr was appalled at the cognitive dissonance that existed between the cushy major press outlets in Saigon, with their lavish budgets and extensive R&R excursions, their “$3,000 a month digs at the Continental or the Caravelle,” and the horrors that were taking place within the city and nearly every other major city in the South. “I have colleagues in the press corps here, some of them incredible fakes, fantastic hacks, who live so well on their expense accounts that they may never be able to adjust to peace.”

…

The Mojave Desert, the West’s last untouched frontier, had been colonized by the greed-mongers, and nobody at the keno tables seemed bothered by the rising body count in Vietnam. For Sal Paradise/Kerouac, the characters on his cross-country trip are an affirmation of the beatitude and bedrock virtue of the underclass; the freak parade of humanity that Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo encounters is merely bestial and overfed on excess.
Raoul Duke/Thompson’s cognitive dissonance in Vegas is most acute when he and Dr. Gonzo attend the National District Attorneys’ Association conference on narcotics and dangerous drugs in the ballroom of the Dunes Hotel. Thompson, who was registered as an accredited journalist for the event, ducked out to score mescaline from a Vegas contact, only to return to a ballroom of fifteen hundred vehemently antidrug cops loudly deriding the use of controlled substances:
Their sound system looked like something Ulysses S.

The vast majority of Americans (70 percent) either believe the answer to the latter question is no or they don’t know.14 Part of that belief comes from the same sort of confidence I’ve just described—we’ve had cell phone technology for almost fifty years; certainly someone must have determined whether the radiation does any damage. Part of that belief could also come from reports of actual studies—hundreds of studies of cell phone radiation have concluded that cell phones cause no increased risk of biological harm.15 And, finally, part of that belief comes from a familiar psychological phenomenon: cognitive dissonance—it would be too hard to believe to the contrary. Like smokers who disbelieved reports about the link between smoking and lung cancer, we cell phone users would find it too hard to accept that this essential technology of modern life was in fact (yet) another ticking cancer time bomb.
Yet, once again, the research raises some questions.
Depending on how you count, there have been at least three hundred studies related to cell phone safety—or, more precisely, studies that try to determine if there is any “biologic effect” from cell phone radiation.

…

Indeed, in a number of polls I’ve seen, the idea is more popular among Republicans than among Democrats. That’s because, for many Republicans, the idea of special-interest influence is the corrupting force in government today. Everything they complain about is tied to that idea.
Beltway Republicans are different of course. The party of Tom DeLay had to make some pretty awful deals with the devil in order to raise the money they needed to win. They’ve developed a fairly complicated, cognitively dissonant account that justifies selling government to the highest bidder.
Outside the Beltway, citizen Republicans aren’t similarly burdened. Citizen Republicans care about the ideals of the party. And those ideals resonate well with the objective of removing the influence of cash in political campaigns. Citizen Republicans identify with those who attack systematic corruption—government that organizes itself to hand out favors to the privileged so as to strengthen its own power.

We invited three groups of people: distinguished psychologists who were willing to endure a day spent talking to economists, some senior economists who were known to have an open mind about new approaches to doing economics, and the few hard-core folks who were engaged in doing research.
Eric is a persuasive guy, and as a result of his charm and arm-twisting, the collection of psychologists who showed up at our initial meeting was truly astonishing. We had not just Amos and Danny, but also Walter Mischel, of the Oreo and marshmallow experiment fame, Leon Festinger, who formulated the idea of cognitive dissonance, and Stanley Schachter, one of the pioneers of the study of emotions. Together they were the psychology version of the dream team. Some of the friendly economists who agreed to participate were also an all-star cast: George Akerlof, William Baumol, Tom Schelling, and Richard Zeckhauser. The hard-core group was Colin, George, Bob, and me. Eric also invited Larry Summers to come to the inaugural meeting, but Larry couldn’t come and suggested inviting one of his recent students, Andrei Shleifer.

The cult’s membership grew in time, and as the apocalyptic date approached, the members left jobs, let properties and businesses languish, and alienated their disbelieving families in expectation of the end times. When the flying saucers and ensuing apocalypse failed to appear on the appointed date, the cult’s believers did not lose faith. On the contrary, the experience bolstered their beliefs, annealing them into an intimate confederacy of false belief. Vestiges of the cult persist even to this day.
This study would lay the groundwork for Festinger’s theory of “cognitive dissonance”: the mental stress people suffer when presented with realities contrary to their deeply held beliefs. The key takeaway is that humans naturally avoid this discomfort, skirting situations that aggravate it, or ignoring data that make their mental contradiction more apparent.
Note: The purpose of the following exposition is not a neener-neener troll of Facebook, reveling in an embarrassing fiasco for the sadistic glee of it.

Although we lost touch in the mid-1990s, I was astonished in 2008 to find that he and his family were on the government’s list of Madoff’s investors. Moreover, a mutual acquaintance told me that Ned, who had made hundreds of millions advising clients, was still directing investors to Madoff the same week that the latter confessed.
Having once known Ned well, I thought back to get more insight into why he believed in Madoff. In my opinion Ned was not a crook. Instead, I think he suffered from so-called cognitive dissonance. That’s where you want to believe something enough that you simply reject any information to the contrary. Nicotine addicts will often deny that smoking endangers their health. Members of political parties react mildly to lies, crimes, and other immorality by their own but are out for blood when the same is done by politicians in the other party.
I also learned early that when I gave Ned my opinion on anything, no matter how careful or reasoned, it didn’t have much impact.

…

corresponding economic loss These extra taxable gains or losses will be offset later if you liquidate your investment.
to catch up Taxes leave me with 70 percent of my sales price. To get back to $100, $70 has to increase by $30 or 42.6 percent.
CHAPTER 26
beat the market This sounds nonsensical at first. What it means is that no one has any information whatsoever that has predictive value.
to the contrary They display the well-known characteristic known as cognitive dissonance.
and hundreds of books An excellent history of these meanderings is Justin Fox’s book The Myth of the Rational Market.
all the future earnings Interpreted as net value paid out or accumulated for the benefit of a sole owner.
on inside information As chronicled by James Stewart in Den of Thieves, Connie Bruck in The Predators’ Ball, and others.
this type profitably Tobias, Andrew, Money Angles, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1984, pp. 71–72.

The Diet Myth: Why America's Obsessions With Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health
by
Paul Campos

“Most of the obesity research community has deemed such data [on the risks of weight loss]
compelling—but not enough to state that weight-loss attempts by obese
46
Fat Science
people are dangerous . . . Nowadays it is not uncommon to hear ‘Diets
don’t work.’ In fact, diets do work. It is prescriptions to diet that fail,
because patients usually do not follow them.” A better illustration of
rampaging cognitive dissonance, as well as of the classic “the operation was a success but the patient died” line of argument, would be
difﬁcult to ﬁnd.
As we have seen, such conclusions can be explained by the economic structure of obesity research. As a practical matter, obesity
research must be funded either by the weight loss industry or by government grants. Government grant money is supposed to ameliorate
the obviously distorting effects that arise when a big pharmaceutical ﬁrm is paying researchers to do work that will justify the tens or
hundreds of millions of dollars the ﬁrm has invested in developing a
particular “cure” for the “disease” of a higher-than-average weight.

…

But then it all goes wrong: “A sexy woman is a woman who
likes her body so of course she takes care of it which makes her lose
weight which makes her like her body even more which makes her
even sexier which makes her exercise more which makes her lose
more weight . . .” A more precise description of the theoretical pretzel
logic behind the practice of anorexia and bulimia would be difﬁcult
to formulate.
Even within the context of the doublethink so characteristic of the
diet culture, the level of cognitive dissonance at the center of Estrich’s
arguments is breathtaking. Again, at the same time that she recognizes
such truths as that there isn’t “a single woman alive who doesn’t do
better, personally and professionally, when she feels great about herself,” and that the key to a fulﬁlling life is to choose “to be your best, to
be happy with yourself, to be ﬁt and strong and self-conﬁdent for
however long you are blessed to be here” she steadfastly refuses to acknowledge the empirically undeniable fact that, for almost all people—
indeed, for Susan Estrich herself, until a couple of years before she wrote
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Fat Politics
this book—feeling great about themselves and being ﬁt and strong and
self-conﬁdent precludes the whole idea of dieting, which at its core is
all about weakness and self-loathing and endless dissatisfaction.

It’s no wonder that omega-3 fatty acids are poised to become the oat bran of our time as food scientists rush to microencapsulate fish and algae oil and blast it into such formerly all-terrestrial foods as bread and pasta, milk and yogurt and cheese, all of which will soon, you can be sure, spout fishy new health claims. (I hope you remember the relevant rule.)
By now you’re probably feeling the cognitive dissonance of the supermarket shopper or science-section reader as well as some nostalgia for the simplicity and solidity of the first few words of this book. Words I’m still prepared to defend against the shifting winds of nutritional science and food-industry marketing, and will. But before I do, it’s important to understand how we arrived at our present state of nutritional confusion and anxiety.

In 2001, I was writing a book that became Pattern Recognition, my seventh novel, though it only did so after 9-11, which I’m fairly certain will be the real start of every documentary ever to be made about the present century. I found the material of the actual twenty-first century richer, stranger, more multiplex, than any imaginary twenty-first century could ever have been. And it could be unpacked with the toolkit of science fiction. I don’t really see how it can be unpacked otherwise, as so much of it is so utterly akin to science fiction, complete with a workaday level of cognitive dissonance we now take utterly for granted.
Zero History, my ninth novel, will be published this September, rounding out that third set of three books. It’s set in London and Paris, last year, in the wake of global financial collapse.
I wish that I could tell you what it’s about, but I haven’t yet discovered my best likely story, about that. That will come with reviews, audience and bookseller feedback (and booksellers are especially helpful, in that way).

If I do get fired, this is the wrong employer to work for in the first place. So, either way, I win. That is my career strategy.
I discovered where I got this rebel streak from only very recently. I realized I inherited it from my dad, which was very strange to me because when I was growing up, I perceived my dad as an establishment figure, part of the very establishment I was rebelling against, so it was a severe cognitive dissonance for me to think of my dad as a rebel. But rebel he was.
My dad started his career as a child laborer (yes, one of those millions of faceless children in developing countries you read about occasionally in National Geographic), but by mid-career, he rose up the ranks to become one of the most senior military officers in all of Singapore. I recently learned that one reason he was so successful was because he was unafraid to speak the unpleasant truth to his superiors to their faces, including Defense Ministers and Prime Ministers.

ZigZag is more of an environment that the user inhabits. Depending on what someone builds into a ZigZag data space, you could wander along many multisensory paths, taking unexpected turns down the dimensions of color then branching off into textures or shapes, or from a sound to a flavor… Maybe multivoice music-like counterpoint could also be explored in the paths through ZigZag’s spaces, with cognitive dissonance resolving to cognitive harmony—or whatever. I could see my Music Mouse software running around inside a ZigZag space.
Transpublishing and the way linking would have been done were Ted to have designed the Web, these deserve much more thought than they’re getting. One of the great deficits of the existing public web, with its one way links is that there is no way to trace anything back to its origin, no provenance.

Facebook is a private corporation; the social graph that Zuckerberg celebrates is a proprietary technology, an asset owned by the shareholders of Facebook itself. And as far as corporations go, Facebook is astonishingly top-heavy: the S-1 revealed that Zuckerberg personally controls 57 percent of Facebook’s voting stock, giving him control over the company’s destiny that far exceeds anything Bill Gates or Steve Jobs ever had. The cognitive dissonance could drown out a Sonic Youth concert: Facebook believes in peer-to-peer networks for the world, but within its own walls, the company prefers top-down control centralized in a charismatic leader.
If Facebook is any indication, it would seem that top-down control is a habit that will be hard to shake. From Henry Ford to Jack Welch to Steve Jobs to Zuckerberg himself, we have long associated corporate success with visionary and inspiring executives.

Our family was like one of those hand-painted road signs that point in a multitude of directions at once: laziness and bad genes were the problem, according to my mother; according to my father and Whitney, Charlie himself was the problem; Charlie would have it that our father alone was the problem; while, according to Bobby and me, an unfortunate alchemy of both Charlie’s and our father’s problems was to blame.
The cognitive dissonance between my parents’ versions of the story and ours simply could not be reconciled. I had written a paper to be presented on a panel at the gallery discussing my piece in purely conceptual terms, yet now I was unearthing a truth that could not be bound by any intellectual discussion. Looking at the piece as an outsider, I liked the tension of the raw emotional material pressing up against the cool, minimalist look I’d chosen—those six rectangular screens displaying enormous talking mouths—but these had nothing to do with me, with what went on inside of me when I myself watched the tapes: the horror, the shock of recognition.

I hope that the world has become more opened with what happened in the Arab world as well. You thought that these were closed societies who would not know what is going on, so I hope this is going to change, but for us, we were like in a bubble, we did not know that there was a different existence; it was very difficult to get out of it.
FB: I guess the older generation, your generation and Nurit’s, the amount of cognitive dissonance as well when you’ve believed in something so strongly all your life, even though the facts show after a while that you are wrong, it is so hard to accept that you were wrong for, let’s say, thirty or forty years of your life. You see that all the time, at events when you always see the same people coming to every single Palestinian event, I always think, they know as much as I do about Palestine and they know the facts.

‘They are fed up to the back teeth with the cardboard cut-out careerists in Westminster,’ said Nigel Farage, the former UKIP leader, of his party’s voter base. ‘The spot-the-difference politicians. Desperate to fight the middle ground, but can’t even find it. Focus groupies. The triangulators. The dog whistlers. The politicians who daren’t say what they really mean.’30
Britain’s London-centric elites got into the habit of compartmentalising signs of a backlash. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing. Long before the 2016 referendum, there were plenty of signs that Britain’s malaise went far deeper than the antics of fringe activists. In the 2001 general election, British voter turnout fell to an historic low of just 59 per cent. This ought to have sounded alarms. Much of the drop was due to rising apathy among working-class voters, who felt Labour put more energy into promoting multiculturalism than to addressing their concerns.

Indeed, as is often the way with modern video games, dissident voices have begun to be heard within the game itself, with a number of members of the public choosing to make ‘virtual protests’ against the actions of the US military by, among other things, registering accounts under the names of soldiers killed while on active duty in Iraq.
Think too long or hard about the ethical intricacies of a simulated environment modelling a combat situation and you’re certain to experience a peculiarly modern kind of cognitive dissonance. It’s something described in detail in reporter Evan Wright’s Generation Kill, an account published in 2004 of the author’s experience of being ‘embedded’ with the First Recon unit of Marines on combat duty during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The young men he watched fighting represented, he writes, ‘more or less America’s first generation of disposable children. More than half of the guys in the platoon come from broken homes and were raised by absentee, single, working parents.

The company formed a group of these particularly talented testers and gave them the charter to do final testing on critical software before it was sent to the customers. Thus was born the legendary Black Team.
The Black Team was initially made up of people who had proved themselves to be slightly better at testing than their peers. They were slightly more motivated. They also were testing code that had been written by someone else, so they were free of the cognitive dissonance that hampers developers when testing their own programs. All in all, those who formed the team might have expected it to achieve at least a modest improvement in product quality, but they didn’t expect more than that. What they got was much more than that.
The most surprising thing about the Black Team was not how good it was at the beginning, but how much it improved during the next year.

“What’s the weather like?” “Should we change clothes?” “Is there gas in the car?” “How hungry are we?” That was brainstorming. Those questions were part of the naturally creative process that happens once you commit to some outcome that hasn’t happened yet. Your brain noticed a gap between what you were looking toward and where you actually were at the time, and it began to resolve that “cognitive dissonance” by trying to fill in the blanks. This is the beginning of the “how” phase of natural planning. But it did the thinking in a somewhat random and ad hoc fashion. Lots of different aspects of going to dinner just occurred to you. You almost certainly didn’t need to actually write all of them down on a piece of paper, but you did a version of that process in your mind.2
Once you had generated a sufficient number of ideas and details, you couldn’t help but start to organize them.

The faster the system learns from you, the more likely it is that you can get trapped in a kind of identity cascade, in which a small initial action—clicking on a link about gardening or anarchy or Ozzy Osbourne—indicates that you’re a person who likes those kinds of things. This in turn supplies you with more information on the topic, which you’re more inclined to click on because the topic has now been primed for you.
Especially once the second click has occurred, your brain is in on the act as well. Our brains act to reduce cognitive dissonance in a strange but compelling kind of unlogic—“Why would I have done x if I weren’t a person who does x—therefore I must be a person who does x.”Each click you take in this loop is another action to self-justify—“Boy, I guess I just really love ‘Crazy Train.’ ” When you use a recursive process that feeds on itself, Cohler tells me, “You’re going to end up down a deep and narrow path.” The reverb drowns out the tune.

The old principle lives on because practitioners are not comfortable with the vision—and promise—of the new. Origination is not just a new way of doing things, but a new way of seeing things.
And the new threatens. It threatens to make the old expertise obsolete. Often in fact, some version of the new principle has been already touted or already exists and has been dismissed by standard practitioners, not necessarily because of lack of imagination but because it creates a cognitive dissonance, an emotional mismatch, between the potential of the new and the security of the old. The sociologist Diane Vaughan talks of this psychological dissonance:
[In the situations we deal with as humans, we use] a frame of reference constructed from integrated sets of assumptions, expectations, and experiences. Everything is perceived on the basis of this framework. The framework becomes self-confirming because, whenever we can, we tend to impose it on experiences and events, creating incidents and relationships that conform to it.

This, I tell myself with a shot of glee, will fade. And then what will a constantly distracted fifty-year-old really bring to the table, except a facility with the technology that made him or her that way? But that, of course, is a fantasy; that fifty-year-old will be a multitasker in a multitasking world. And my own idea of a work ethic will be outmoded.
No two generations in history have experienced such a highlighted cognitive dissonance, because never has change occurred at so rapid a pace. Look at the rate of penetration—the amount of time it takes for a new technology to be adopted by fifty million people. Radio took thirty-eight years to reach that mark; the telephone took twenty years; and television took thirteen. More recently, the World Wide Web took four years, Facebook took 3.6, Twitter took three, and the iPad took only two.

‘I think he’s broken and that people mistake it for shamelessness,’ I said.
People really were very keen to imagine Jonah as shameless, as lacking in that quality, as if he were something not quite human that had adopted human form. I suppose it’s no surprise that we feel the need to dehumanize the people we hurt - before, during, or after the hurting occurs. But it always comes as a surprise. In psychology it’s known as cognitive dissonance. It’s the idea that it feels stressful and painful for us to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time (like the idea that we’re kind people and the idea that we’ve just destroyed someone). And so to ease the pain we create illusory ways to justify our contradictory behaviour. It’s like when I used to smoke and I’d hope the tobacconist would hand me the pack that read ‘Smoking Causes Ageing Of The Skin’ instead of the pack that read ‘Smoking Kills’, because ageing of the skin?

There are bonus points if either of these punch lines make you smile:
Joke 7
“The share of the hypertense muse equals the sum of the shares of the other two brides.”
2 points
Joke 8
“The squire of the high pot and noose is equal to the sum of the squires of the other two sides.”
2 points
TOTAL – 20 POINTS
CHAPTER 5
Six Degrees of Separation
While visiting Los Angeles in October 2012, I was lucky enough to attend a table-read of an upcoming episode of The Simpsons titled “Four Regrettings and a Funeral.” This involved the cast reading through the entire episode in order to iron out any problems before the script was finalized in preparation for animation. It was bizarre to see and hear a fully grown Yeardley Smith delivering lines with little Lisa’s voice. Similarly, I experienced extreme cognitive dissonance when I heard the voices of Homer, Marge, and Moe Szyslak, whose tones and diction are so familiar from years of watching The Simpsons, emerge from the all-too-human forms of Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, and Hank Azaria.
Although there is much else to appreciate in “Four Regrettings and a Funeral,” it is sadly lacking in mathematical references. However, that same day I was given a preliminary script for another upcoming episode, “The Saga of Carl,” which contained an entire scene dedicated to the mathematics of probability.

Given our enslavement to our own individual consciousnesses (at least until
redesign), what lies between the Scylla of Level I narcissism
and the Charybdis of Level III resignation and despair? What
could it meant to engage authentically-fearlessly, openly, honestly-in a world that seems not only to render the individual
meaningless but also to make comprehension impossible? It
means that authenticity must build on a foundational cognitive dissonance. One must accept the validity of one's own experience, upbringing, culture, and other contributions to one's
own grounding while simultaneously understanding that one is
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Chapter 8
a partial and contingent reflection of the evolving and incomprehensible complexity that is out there.
The continual temptation offered by the Enlightenment is to
escape this dilemma through resort to ideas and ideals of progress, especially the expansion of knowledge about our world.

Despite the best efforts of Stallman and other hackers to remind people that the word "free" in free software stood for freedom and not price, the message still wasn't getting
138
through. Most business executives, upon hearing the term for the first
time, interpreted the word as synonymous with "zero cost," tuning out
any follow up messages in short order. Until hackers found a way to get
past this cognitive dissonance, the free software movement faced an uphill climb, even after Netscape.
Peterson, whose organization had taken an active interest in advancing the free software cause, offered an alternative: open source.
Looking back, Peterson says she came up with the open source term
while discussing Netscape's decision with a friend in the public relations
industry. She doesn't remember where she came upon the term or if she
borrowed it from another field, but she does remember her friend disliking the term.5
At the meeting, Peterson says, the response was dramatically different.

pages: 223words: 77,566

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
by
J. D. Vance

We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing merchandise and selling it on eBay, or for having a customer complain about the smell of alcohol on our breath, or for taking five thirty-minute restroom breaks per shift. We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance—the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.
We talk to our children about responsibility, but we never walk the walk. It’s like this: For years I’d dreamed of owning a German shepherd puppy. Somehow Mom found me one. But he was our fourth dog, and I had no clue how to train him. Within a few years, all of them had vanished—given to the police department or to a family friend.

For youth or adult alike, the habit may serve to compensate for profound feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, or an abiding bitterness that stems from degraded social status, low occupational achievement, certifiable injustice, or paranoid delusion. Such victims of social pathology are suspected of smoking not in spite of the hazards associated with it but because of them.
Even better-adjusted smokers, though, are susceptible to the perverse condition that behavioral specialists call “cognitive dissonance,” acting in direct and self-destructive contradiction of known truths or indisputable fact. And all smokers are gifted at rationalizing their habit. Many smokers, for example, readily acknowledge, even insist, that they are hopelessly hooked. But as addictions go, they may argue, it is pretty benign. Even as the mild kick of the inhaled cigarette does not compare with heroin’s euphoric high or the giddiness induced by marijuana or the sudden brightening of spirits that alcohol can bring on, neither does smoking result in any of the acute physical impairments or social disruptions of those more powerful narcotics.

…

Their fears of withdrawal symptoms are surpassed in many cases, furthermore, by the dread of assault from life’s countless vicissitudes, which they have convinced themselves they could not cope with if denied a cigarette at the next stressful moment. Smokers are thus classic rationalizers and hiders from fact when unwelcome word arrives about the perils of the one thing they think lets them cope with life. They are the very model of the type described by Leon Festinger in his 1957 treatise, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance—people who act in ways that deny knowledge of the consequences of hurtful or self-destructive acts.
Yet for all the conflict they endure over their dependency, most smokers deeply resent the ever more widely held suspicion by smoke-free society that they suffer from flawed characters or emotional instability because they persist in what they shouldn’t. The more articulate of them reply with two basic arguments.

…

Even when the warning labels went on, she refused to believe it. The antismoking commercials ordered by the FCC soon followed, and Tony often pointed them out to her. She remembered one that went, “Smoking—it’s a matter of life and breath,” and got lectured by her granddaughter, who told her, “Grandma, smoking kills.” Yet she kept on.
Rose Cipollone, in short, had a textbook case of what academics termed “cognitive dissonance”. A pair of social psychologists, Harold Kasarjian and Joel Cohen, both of whom would testify in the Cipollone trial, had suggested in the autumn 1965 issue of California Management Review how smokers dwelled in a constant state of disequilibrium because their dependency conflicted with the human impulse to survive and continued “in the face of undeniable and overwhelming evidence that cancer is directly attributable” to smoking.

They found that after giving a short lecture about the benefits of a certain drug, the speaker would begin to believe his own words and soon prescribe accordingly. Psychological studies show that we quickly and easily start believing whatever comes out of our own mouths, even when the original reason for expressing the opinion is no longer relevant (in the doctors’ case, that they were paid to say it). This is cognitive dissonance at play; doctors reason that if they are telling others about a drug, it must be good—and so their own beliefs change to correspond to their speech, and they start prescribing accordingly.
The reps told us that they employed other tricks too, turning into chameleons—switching various accents, personalities, and political affiliations on and off. They prided themselves on their ability to put doctors at ease.

"I would say, Mr. Chairman, that of the major, reputable investment banking firms that perform functions in this area, you would find most of the major investment banking firms in this business, I would say, being 10 or 15 firms of a major character." Felix would return often to this public obsession with the moral and ethical conduct of his fellow investment bankers--seemingly so fraught with cognitive dissonance--even as recently as July 2004, some thirty-five years after his testimony before the Celler commission. In a New York Times interview, he opined, "You should come to the business with a moral code. You're certainly not going to learn it later on. If people conduct themselves in ways that could be deemed immoral, I really wouldn't blame Wall Street, I would blame the individuals themselves who by and large should know better."

…

A typical defense came from Stephen Friedman, then a leading M&A adviser at Goldman Sachs, who later led the prestigious firm with Robert Rubin before each entered national politics: "These fees don't come from widows and orphans. They come from people who are more than capable of strenuously negotiating over the amount of the fee. Fees are the purest form of competition. The companies have full knowledge of what other banks are getting for similar deals and the service provided, and they are not shy."
Felix, though, having perfected the art of cognitive dissonance, alone among his peers criticized the growing fees. "The level of fees is so different depending on what happens--and that's the unhealthy element," he told the Times. An apex of sorts was clearly reached during one of the most infamous takeover battles of all time--the 1982 fight for Bendix between Martin Marietta, Allied, and United Technologies. Bendix, led by its charismatic CEO, William Agee, took the offensive by launching a hostile offer for Martin Marietta, another aerospace company.

…

He also criticized the many Lazard competitors that were using their own capital to make risky bridge loans to help their clients complete leveraged acquisitions. "Market conditions may occur under which a bridge loan cannot be refinanced," he correctly predicted. As to the concern about foreign acquisitions, Felix simply acknowledged that it "is becoming an area of increasing economic and political importance," and then sought clarification on the rules of engagement. Afterward, more than one of his partners remarked on the level of cognitive dissonance that Felix must be able to withstand after, on the one hand, actively participating in the acquisition of American companies by Japanese companies and, on the other hand, being able to testify before senators trying to come to terms with the phenomenon--and not even acknowledge before them his own role.
Maybe it was because he was not yet finished playing that role. In the fall of 1990, Felix's friend and literary agent, Mort Janklow, asked him to lunch at the Four Seasons restaurant to meet Michael Ovitz, the uber-Hollywood talent agent, who was then the head of the Creative Artists Agency.

There are few things humans eat that
are quite so elemental—a handful of leaves, after all, consumed raw.
»
167
168 * THE O M N I V O R E ' S DILEMMA
When we're eating salad we're behaving a lot like herbivores, drawing
as close as we ever do to all those creatures who bend their heads down
to the grass, or reach up into the trees, to nibble on plant leaves. We add
only the thinnest veneer of culture to these raw leaves, dressing them in
oil and vinegar. Much virtue attaches to this kind of eating, for what do
we regard as more wholesome than tucking into a pile of green leaves?
The contrast of the simplicity of this sort of eating, with all its pastoral overtones, and the complexity of the industrial process behind it
produced a certain cognitive dissonance in my refrigerated mind. I began to feel that I no longer understood what this word I'd been following across the country and the decades really meant—I mean, of
course, the word "organic." It is an unavoidable and in some ways impolite question, and very possibly besides the point if you look at the
world the way Gene Kahn or Drew and Myra Goodman do, but in precisely what sense can that box of salad on sale in a Whole Foods three
thousand miles and five days away from this place truly be said to be
organic?

…

Such has been the genius of capitalism, to re-create something
akin to a state of nature in the modern supermarket or fast-food outlet,
throwing us back on a perplexing, nutritionally perilous landscape
deeply shadowed again by the omnivore 's dilemma.
•
303
SEVENTEEN
THE ETHICS OF
EATING ANIMALS
1. THE STEAKHOUSE DIALOGUES
The first time I opened Peter Singer's Animal Liberation I was dining alone
at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium rare. If that
sounds like a recipe for cognitive dissonance, if not indigestion, well,
that was sort of the idea. It had been a long time since this particular
omnivore had felt any dilemma about eating meat, but then I had never
before involved myself so directly in the processes of turning animals
into food: owning a steak-bound steer, working the killing cones in
Joel Salatin's processing shed, and now preparing to hunt a wild animal. The steak dinner in question took place on the evening before steer
number 534's slaughter, the one event in his life I was not allowed to
witness or even learn anything about, save its likely date.

The history of every airport in the United States will tell you this will happen,” promised a developer who spent two years wrangling with the FAA for the right to build closer to the fence. “Are there really people who want to live close to an airport? Yeah, there are. That’s been proven around the country too. They travel a lot on business, or whatever it is they do, but they’re connected to the airport in some way, shape, or form. Somehow.”
Clearly, cognitive dissonance is at work. We loudly decry the noise, pollution, and congestion of airports, and yet our fundamental quality-of-life decision—where and how to live—seems predicated on having one close at hand, even if we rarely fly. It helps that especially massive ones like DIA and DFW double as enormous publicly financed infrastructure investments galvanizing private developers—much like what I-70 and I-225 had done for Aurora in its 1970s and 1980s heyday.

…

The last holdouts are likely to be the airlines, which require a dense and ferocious amount of energy to defy the laws of physics. From an efficiency standpoint, the best solution for halving transportation’s share of carbon emissions is to electrify cars from renewable sources, leaving whatever oil is left for aviation. Its share of emissions would look progressively worse while the total shrinks, but we’d get over the cognitive dissonance.
“We are driven as humans to adapt to new technologies, and we’re blessed with the ability to transfer them quickly across societies,” Kasarda told me in Beijing. “But people don’t change their ideas and beliefs nearly as fast. In anthropology, it’s known as ‘cultural lag.’ And the lag in this case means we’re able to envision disaster but not the future. Will we find alternatives? Absolutely.

It also implies that TA practitioners
most experienced with a useless method will be the least able to recognize its ﬂaws because of more lengthy exposure to the method’s chancebased successes.
Motivational Factors
The conﬁrmation bias is also driven by motivational factors. TA practitioners have a large emotional and ﬁnancial investment in their favored
method. This is especially true of practitioners whose professional lives
are tied to a particular method.
There is also a strong motive to maintain consistency within our system beliefs and attitudes. The theory of cognitive dissonance formulated
by Festinger78 contends that people are motivated to reduce or avoid psychological inconsistencies.79 The discomfort provoked by evidence that
contradicts what we believe makes it hard to digest such evidence.
Biased Questions and Search
The conﬁrmation bias also slants the way questions are framed, thereby
biasing the search for new evidence. This search bias increases the
chance of encountering new evidence that supports the prior belief
while reducing the possibility of encountering nonconﬁrming or contradictory facts.

…

Park, Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000).
G.T. Wilson and D. Abrams, “Effects of Alcohol on Social Anxiety and Psychological Arousal: Cognitive versus Pharmacological Processes,” Cognitive
Research and Therapy 1 (1975), 195–210.
Gilovich, How We Know, 50.
M. Jones and R. Sugden, “Positive Conﬁrmation Bias in the Acquisition of Information,” Theory and Decision 50 (2001), 59–99.
L. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1957).
S. Plous, The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), 23.
Practitioners who actually trade on their predictions do get clear feedback
on results, but as pointed out in this chapter this feedback can be diluted by
other cognitive distortions (e.g., self-attribution bias).
A bull trap, or breakout failure, occurs when shortly after the breakout penetration occurs, prices repenetrate the breakout level in the opposite direction.

Like all successful innovating entrepreneurs, cultural entrepreneurs combined an ability to “read” their market with their original insights, altering the culture by adding items to the menu of cultural choices but not being so outrageously different as to become ineffectual. Some of them did so by sensing a latent demand: a dissatisfaction with some cultural beliefs or knowledge, or diffuse and incoherent earlier attempts to cope with a new reality. For cultural entrepreneurs to be successful, some disconnect must exist between the prevalent cultural elements and some new information that does not quite square with it. This is much like Thomas Kuhn’s cognitive dissonance or what he called “awareness of anomaly,” caused by the accumulation of evidence inconsistent with the current paradigm and thus leading to scientific revolutions. What was true for astronomy in the sixteenth century was equally true for anatomy and theology. Because such dissonances evolved independently, they elicited responses that tended at first to be diffuse and required coordination and standardization.

The safety net was weak, however, an outcome of the pecuniary nature of American politics, which—then, as now—bestows outsized influence on the affluent donor class including the business community.
And so we arrive at 1981. A wave of new politicians crowded into Washington, determined to unravel this grand agreement so painfully and thoughtfully pieced together in the 1930s and 1940s. Suffering with cognitive dissonance toward economic history, unwilling to learn from the Great Depression, and enthralled by the certitude of powerful personalities pursuing an ideological agenda, they launched the Reagan era. What was their biggest mistake? They threw Adam Smith under the bus, ignoring his warning that “The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever.”

…

Surveys by Michael Norton and Ariely found that respondents believe the top 20 percent own less than 60 percent of American wealth, when their actual share is close to 90 percent.18
Reform hinges on new rules from Washington. Yet, despite the 2012 election outcome, many voters remain distrustful of government, the lingering effects of decades of demonization. This attitude is reinforced by the rather pervasive cognitive dissonance of Americans regarding the sizable role played by government in their lives, documented in research by economist Suzanne Mettler of Cornell University. She found that 44 percent of Social Security recipients, 43 percent of those receiving unemployment benefits, and 40 percent of both Medicare and GI Bill beneficiaries say they “have not used a government program.”19
Even so, American voters are not fools and realize they are economically downtrodden.

The unreal love of the sentimentalist reaches no
further than the self and gives precedence to pleasures and
pains of its own, or else invents for itself a gratifying image of
the pleasures and pains of its object.101
The quote is from Roger Scruton’s Animal Rights and Wrongs, a
book that to me was the equivalent of prodding Sappho’s rubble on
the beach, and yes, I am squeamish. I’m uneasy criticizing a movement that is working to stop torture. And it leaves me with a wrenching sense of moral cognitive dissonance to find my criticism expressed
by someone who is otherwise repugnant to me. But sometimes your
enemies are your best critics, and Scruton is precisely right about
sentimentality.
The AR movement is liberal individualism applied to animals. It
is a reflection of human needs and desires, not the needs and desires
of animals themselves. The animals, for instance, want to hunt. They
want to eat the food evolution has designed them for.

So it might make sense that a sentiment classifier should be biased the same way, and all else being equal, favor pos classifications over neg. But there’s a design problem here: if a sentiment classifier is more biased towards the pos class, it will produce more false positives. And if you plan on surfacing these positive reviews, showing them to normal people that have no insight into how a sentiment classifier works, you really don’t want to show a false positive review. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance when you claim that a business is highly rated and most people like it, while at the same time showing a negative review. One of the worst things you can do when designing a user interface is to show conflicting messages at the same time. So by balancing the pos and neg categories, I was able to reduce that bias and decrease false positives. This was accomplished by simply pruning the number of pos reviews until it was equal to the number of neg reviews.

Indeed, Israelis, fed up with the economic situation in Tel Aviv, demanded to change the game unilaterally, with no discussion of the occupation or the deep-seated separation principle which has taken over Israeli society. The simple fact apparently lost on many Israelis is that Israeli and Palestinian society is more connected now than at any other time. Israelis have been able to maintain their society and its willing ignorance of the situation in the West Bank only through collective cognitive dissonance. This explains the bitter reaction of many tent protesters when presented with the paradox of demanding social justice without discussion of the occupation. It also explains the generally negative sentiment towards the joint struggle, as well as the low numbers of Israelis who join the protests.
What is unavoidably clear from the protest climate in Israel/Palestine is that pockets of civil society are taking political matters into their own hands.

It sustained the suffragist when prison guards pumped a force-feeding tube down her throat.
Optimism has also had its liabilities, collective blind spots of complacency that ultimately produced recessions, depressions, and financial collapses; the dead and maimed of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; and bodies floating in the streets of New Orleans.
Continuing your patterns of behavior in the face of evidence that you will end up badly is a well-known psychological construct. Cognitive dissonance, in which people feel discomfort when they hold conflicting ideas simultaneously, can sometimes be a variant of this. Denial of what is objectively apparent is another. Psychologists have catalogued numerous ways in which people would rather hunker down in their present dysfunctional jobs, relationships, or lifestyles that are leading to personal disaster than risk the discomfort and uncertainty that come with taking responsibility for their futures.

Part of our reason for being here at this meeting is to talk about the lack of a similar infrastructure for platforms for free expression, because this has been an area where we believe that in the past the legislation has not paid enough attention. We do believe in the protection of intellectual property. We also believe in the balance that permits a free and vibrant platform for free expression.”
Wong’s arguments were met with dubious frowns on the faces of the elected representatives of the American people. The cognitive dissonance on display at that hearing highlighted an inconvenient reality: politicians throughout the democratic world are pushing for stronger censorship and surveillance by Internet companies to stop the theft of intellectual property. They are doing so in response to aggressive lobbying by powerful corporate constituents without adequate consideration of the consequences for civil liberties, and for democracy more broadly.

It was, many believed, the American Dream manifest: all you
needed was a good idea, some sweat equity, and a garage, and the digital
economy would bestow on you its mighty gifts. I understood the itch for
4
Chapter 1
the million. Straightforward greed was not what was tying my brain in
knots. What I had trouble wrapping my head around was Silicon Valley’s
unique way of combining utopian fervor with blatant dissociation from
reality, a cognitive dissonance that led me to a personal crisis of conscience
and eventually drove me out of the Bay Area.
People around me seemed to believe that the high-tech economy was
going to lift all boats—lead to better outcomes for everyone—but they were
ignoring the obvious evidence of increasing economic inequality that I saw
around me every day. How could people simultaneously think they were
all going to get ﬁlthy rich and make the world a better place for everyone?

Our sympathy might lead us to say that the mother deserves to be given time off or a reduced workload because of her bereavement. It would be very odd to say she deserved to be paid more.
40 See Dick (1975) for further discussion of the difficulties.
41 See Wolff (2003) and Moriarty (2005).
42 Rawls (1999), p89.
43 Sher (2003) shows how hard it is to define effort in a way that leaves it entirely within our control.
44 Frey (1997).
45 Fehr and Gachter (2000).
46 That is, cognitive dissonance is reduced once it is recognized that tax brings benefits as well as being unavoidable.
47 Torgler (2007).
Chapter 5
1 John Adams, second President of the United States. In Adams (1850—1856), p193.
2 Kahneman (1999), p22.
3 Kahneman (1999), p3.
4 See Frey and Stutzer (2007) for further details and full references.
5 Davidson et al (2000), Davidson (2000, 2004). Throughout, for the sake of simplicity in summarizing the neuroscience, I only describe results for right-handed people.
6 Coghill et al (2003).
7 Inglehart (1990).
8 Shao (1993).
9 Uttal (2001).
10 Uttal (2001).
11 See Farah (1994), Adolphs (2003) and Tingley (2006).
12 Veenhoven (2000).
13 This paragraph and the next two draw heavily on Wierzbicka (2004).

He’s surprisingly gentle and deft for such an inappropriately big entity. “To win, you’ve got to find a better argument and convince everybody. Oh, and you need to get to present it in court, but that’s not so hard. If your argument were better, 639,219 would agree with you, right?”
“No!” Huw tenses angrily, but is brought up short by a knot. “She’s a traitor—”
“No, she’s you. A version of you with a different value system, is all. Her stimulus led to cognitive dissonance and she dealt with it by changing her mind. It’s fun; you should try it some time. Not,” he adds hastily, “right now, but in principle. What do you wash this with, baking soda?”
“You’re telling me I have to change her mind,” Huw manages to say through gritted teeth.
“Something like that would do, yes. And to do it, you’ll need to come up with a better argument to explain why, oh, this lump of rock you’re so attached to is worth keeping around as something other than convenient lumps of computronium.

A machine defeats the world champion.
Kasparov, of course, immediately proposes a 1998 “best out of three” tiebreaker match for all the marbles—“I personally guarantee I will tear it in pieces”—but as soon as the dust settles and the press walks away, IBM quietly cuts the team’s funding, reassigns the engineers, and begins to slowly take Deep Blue apart.
Doc, I’m a Corpse
When something happens that creates a cognitive dissonance, when two of our beliefs are shown to be incompatible, we’re still left with the choice of which one to reject. In academic philosophy circles this has a famous joke:
A guy comes in to the doctor’s, says, “Doc, I’m a corpse. I’m dead.”
The doctor says, “Well, are corpses … ticklish?”
“Course not, doc!”
Then the doctor tickles the guy, who giggles and squirms away. “See?” says the doctor.

Fuller
I'M NOT GOING TO EXPLAIN HOW I GOT HERE FROM THERE: JUST take it as given that it is now ten o'clock in the morning, I am still in the office (but called Mo half an hour ago to see she's okay), I haven't shaved or slept, and there's a BLOODY BARON meeting in five minutes. I've got Amarok running on my desktop (playing "Drowning in Berlin" on endless repeat, because I need a pounding beat to keep me awake) and I've plowed through the CODICIL BLACK SKULL file that Angleton left me, and then on into a bunch of tedious legwork for this morning's session. I'm suffering from severe cognitive dissonance; every so often you think you've got a handle on this job, on the paper clip audits and interminable bureaucracy and committee meetings, and then something insane crawls out of the woodwork and gibbers at you, something crazy enough to give James Bond nightmares that just happen to be true.
I close the CBS file and I'm just sticking it back in my secure document safe when Iris pops her head round the door.

For the State at war commands loy­
alty not just by demanding that its citizens consent to kill others; it also
does so by demanding that they consent to sacrifice—their well-being
and, ultimately, their lives—for the sake and at the behest of the State.
The Death-State, in other words, specifically aggravates the very vulner­
ability it transforms into irrevocable loyalty to itself and to the cause of
war. The strategic effectiveness of repeated calls to “support the troops”
was clear evidence, based on the staggering power of cognitive dissonance,
that people become incapable of questioning a cause to which citizens’
lives are sacrificed—because of the very fact o fth at sacrifice; and it is tes­
timony to the strength of their abject identification with the Death-State.
State power thus derives not just from being in the position to decide and
declare who is friend and who is enemy but from being in the position to
demand the ultimate sacrifice: to give one’s life for one’s country.

“Fine,” she said, “let me.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. She had short-circuited my one ironclad logical point. Let her die? What was I supposed to say? I could treat her HIV and what appeared to be neurosyphilis, but how was I supposed to treat whatever made her favor dying over taking the pills?
Standing before her, I felt the glare of my colleagues. Chanel must have sensed my cognitive dissonance. She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Can we talk about this later, one-on-one?”
“You can talk,” Dre said, “talk all you want.”
“Very well,” Chanel said. “I’ll come back later.”
We stepped out of the room and discussed the approach to this difficult patient. Everyone agreed that a multidisciplinary approach would be necessary, incorporating psychiatry, social work, nursing, and potentially a host of other specialists.

“I am thinking about treating this topic very extensively,” confessed Galileo, “in opposition to heretics, the most influential of whom I hear accept Copernicus’s opinion; I would want to show them that we Catholics continue to be certain of the old truth taught us by the sacred authors, not for lack of scientific understanding, or for not having studied as many arguments, experiments, observations, and demonstrations as they have, but rather because of the reverence we have toward the writings of our Fathers and because of our zeal in religion and faith.”
Italian astronomers, in other words, could tolerate the cognitive dissonance of admiring Copernicus on a theoretical level, while rejecting him theologically. “Thus, when they [Protestants] see that we understand very well all their astronomical and physical reasons, and indeed also others much more powerful than those advanced till now, at most they will blame us as men who are steadfast in our beliefs, but not as blind to and ignorant of the human disciplines; and this is something which in the final analysis should not concern a true Catholic Christian—I mean that a heretic laughs at him because he gives priority to the reverence and trust which is due to the sacred authors over all the arguments and observations of astronomers and philosophers put together.”

For the market to be the ideal organizational mode, some economists assume that rational actors will rank the order of their preferences linearly: if rational actors prefer option A over B as well as option B over C, they also will prefer option A over C. Yet this view of the market has been challenged in recent decades. Markets hide transaction costs and information asymmetries. Behavioral economists have demonstrated how under a number of conditions (such as fear, regret, the threat of loss, cognitive dissonance, or peer pressure) the rational homo economicus is a fiction: a person may prefer apples to bananas, bananas to cantaloupes, and cantaloupes to apples, and there is no guarantee that there exists a rational solution to voting systems or daily choices involving three or more actors.24
By contrast, the concept of hierarchy (from the Greek term ἱεραρχία, “rule by priests”) reaches back fifteen centuries to religious roots.

She smiles. The thought of the place she put me in before does make her look a little like the Oortian dark god of the void. ‘Perhonen will show you your quarters.’
When the thief is gone, Mieli lies down in the pilot’s crèche. She feels exhausted, even though the biot feed of her body – that has been waiting for her with Perhonen, for months – tells her she is perfectly rested. But the cognitive dissonance is worse.
Was it me who was in the Prison? Or another?
She remembers the long weeks of preparation, days of subjective slowtime in a q-suit, getting ready to commit a crime just so she could be caught by the Archons and enter the Prison: the eternity in her cell, mind wrapped in an old memory. The violent escape, hurled through the sky by the pellegrini, waking up in a new body, shaking and raw.

“In all probability a much more massive unfree or limited service would have been drafted into the plantation colonies from the ranks of white convicts and other outcasts—in which case the planters’ privileges would unmistakably have rested on the labour of landless workers with small hope of advancement for themselves and their children.”25
Plantation owners were paternalistic in their language, referring to their slaves as part of their families, but they calculated slaves as property and did not hesitate to sell them, distribute them in wills, or take any other steps that were necessary to maximize profit.26 If slaves are counted both as wealth and as potential owners of wealth, then inequality in the entire pre-Civil-War period is even more extreme than scholars of American inequality have calculated.27 Nor was the society in which slaves lived a monolith; rather, occupation, gender, the size of the community in which slaves lived, and geography created inequalities.28
The existence of slavery in a “free” country entailed a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. James L. Huston argues that from the outset, slavery conflicted with the notion of receiving the fruits of one’s labor that was essential to Republicanism, and that writers including Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson realized this.29 But the Founders did not let their hesitation about labor’s rewards get in the way of a federal Constitution that enshrined and perpetuated slavery. And the Northern states enjoyed the benefits of a prosperous South.

“Those are good questions you’re asking. Keep it up.” Some of my words even sparked lengthy discussions.
After we were done the chairperson asked if I’d be willing to serve on other committees. “We could use more of your insights,” she told me. I was proud to have done a good job and honoured that she’d asked. As I pictured my staff putting water pumps on Land Rovers the next day, I thought of the phrase “cognitive dissonance,” and I wondered if I was facing a similar mental situation now, having to function effectively in two different worlds.
The early committee service led to other appointments and my increased involvement in autism science. My world was becoming so different, so fast. I was proud of my contribution, and of acceptance in a new world, but I was often terrified and also lonely. For the first time in quite a few years, Martha was not beside me in a new field of endeavour.

The annual value of the NBA’s television rights was pegged at $400 million a year through 2008, and that doesn’t include the future clip royalties.
Then, after a stint at Viacom and Barry Diller’s Studios USA, Miller took on the unenviable task of fixing AOL. It was 2005, and the problems were written large on the front door.
AOL was an ISP (a dial-up Internet service provider) in a world that was going broadband. You didn’t have to wake up in the morning and have cognitive dissonance around that. AOL knew it couldn’t sell its dial-up business and that it was going to go to zero—and fast. And, since parent company TimeWarner owned cable, the broadband business was already taken. Miller needed to imagine a new AOL with a new focus: “There aren’t a huge number of options, but I thought, ‘How do you figure out how to make a lot of content that people want to consume, since you’re essentially an aggregator of lots of other peoples’ content and services?’”

But a few of the old hands within Salomon Brothers suffered a more complicated response to their money. Not that they ever doubted they were worth every penny they got. But they were uneasy with the explosion of debt in America. (In general, the better they recalled the Great Depression, the more suspicious they were of the leveraging of America.) The head of bond research at Salomon, Henry Kaufman, was, when I arrived, our most acute case of cognitive dissonance. He was the guru of the bond market and also the conscience of our firm. He told investors whether their fast-moving bonds were going up or down. He was so often right that the markets made him famous if not throughout the English-speaking world then at least among the sort of people who read the Wall Street Journal. Yet Kaufman was known as Dr. Gloom.
The party had been thrown in his honor, but he seemed to want it to end.

But she wanted Joan back, not for the world but for herself.
Get yourself cloned and any half-decent clinic could suck up memories from a soul chip and spit them back into a fresh cortex.
Feelings were something else. And the problem with straight copying was you know what happened to you, maybe even why it happened. What you didn’t get from a soul chip is what you felt while it was happening. It brought a whole new meaning to cognitive dissonance.
Joan was fifty-five. So her brain would have processed the equivalent of 300 million books. Which sounded big but came out as around ten terrabites of memory, not remotely hard for five chips.
But dreams are like feelings. Just as you can’t chip the flickering dendritic matrix that ties emotionally-rich events into a shifting web of neural connections, so it’s impossible to hardcopy the rush that kicks in during REM sleep when the frontal lobes shut down, emotional centres fire up and the brain swims with acetyl-choline.

“We find it more rewarding when someone’s initially negative feelings toward us gradually become positive than if that person’s feelings for us were entirely positive all along.”
While we’ll have an especially strong affinity toward our converted rivals, will they feel the same way toward us? Yes—this is the second advantage of converting resisters. To like us, they have to work especially hard to overcome their initial negative impressions, telling themselves, I must have been wrong about that person. Moving forward, to avoid the cognitive dissonance of changing their minds yet again, they’ll be especially motivated to maintain a positive relationship.
Third, and most important, it is our former adversaries who are the most effective at persuading others to join our movements. They can marshal better arguments on our behalf, because they understand the doubts and misgivings of resisters and fence-sitters. And they’re a more credible source, because they haven’t just been Pollyanna followers or “yes men” all along.

But if the process of joining is common among most humans, why do some people join while others do not?
The answer is in the persuasive power of the principles of influence and the choice of what type of group to join. Cult experts and activists Steve Hassan (1990) and Margaret Singer outline a number of psychological influences that shape people's thoughts and behaviors that lead them to join more dangerous groups (and that are quite independent of intelligence): cognitive dissonance; obedience to authority; group compliance and conformity; and especially the manipulation of rewards, punishments, and experiences with the purpose of controlling behavior, information, thought, and emotion (what Hassan 2000 calls the "BITE model"). Social psychologist Robert Cialdini (1984) demonstrates in his enormously persuasive book on influence, that all of us are influenced by a host of social and psychological variables, including physical attractiveness, similarity, repeated contact or exposure, familiarity, diffusion of responsibility, reciprocity, and many others.

If the only conclusion about the power of the Internet that Western policymakers have drawn from the Iranian events is that tweets are good for social mobilization, they are not likely to outsmart their authoritarian adversaries, who have so far shown much more sophistication in the online world. It’s becoming clear that understanding the full impact of the Internet on the democratization of authoritarian states would require more than just looking at the tweets of Iranian youngsters, for they only tell one part of the story. Instead, one needs to embark on a much more thorough and complex analysis that would look at the totality of forces shaped by the Web.
Much of the current cognitive dissonance is of do-gooders’ own making. What did they get wrong? Well, perhaps it was a mistake to treat the Internet as a deterministic one-directional force for either global liberation or oppression, for cosmopolitanism or xenophobia. The reality is that the Internet will enable all of these forces—as well as many others—simultaneously. But as far as laws of the Internet go, this is all we know.

Conventional economics assumes the financial system is a linear, continuous, rational machine and these false assumptions are built into the risk models used by many of the world’s banks.1
Despite the success achieved by fractal geometry and nonlinear modeling in the study of earthquakes, weather, evolution, ecology, and other complex systems, Mandelbrot always faced the same objection from economists when he proposed applying similar techniques to markets. These non-Gaussian mathematical methods could only provide approximations, as opposed to the precise answers offered by the Efficient Market Hypothesis and Gaussian statistics.2 The fact that the exact answers of EMH bore no relation to reality did not seem to deter “scientific” economists.
Another striking example of the cognitive dissonance in the use of mathematics by scientific economists is provided by Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg, two U.S. economists who have pioneered a research program they describe as Imperfect Knowledge Economics (IKE). This approach explicitly challenges the most important—and most implausible—assumption of rational expectations: the idea that there is one best model of how the economy works, which every rational economic agent will find out about.

For
instance, some people will program their home computers/entertainment centers to sift the Web for only those
news articles, shows, and magazines that agree with opinions they already have, or reduce all opponents to
caricatures. We already see this trend in channels devoted to specific ethnic and religious groups, and in the cult
followings of pundits like Rush Limbaugh.
According to Paul Steiger, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. “The ability of people with like minds to
talk to each other [on the Internet] is wonderful. But if only people of like minds talk to each other, you get the
kind of cognitive dissonance that is destructive to a democracy.” As individuals use such new tools to tailor
privacy guardians and personalized data sieves, choosing which sympathetic voices will be allowed into their
home and which dissenting ones will be blocked out, the result may be nearly perfect isolation in walled-off
worlds of the mind. David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times posed the dilemma thus:
What will happen to our already fragmented sense of community if everyone is reading different stories on
different subjects, seeing different advertisements for different products and, in essence, communicating by
e-mail and in online chat rooms only with people who share their own interests?

People do not apply this to their own lives, interestingly: they tend to assume that they will live longer, stay married longer and travel more than they do. Some 19 per cent of Americans believe themselves to be in the top 1 per cent of income earners. Yet surveys consistently reveal individuals to be personally optimistic yet socially pessimistic. Dane Stangler calls this ‘a non-burdensome form of cognitive dissonance we all walk around with’. About the future of society and the human race people are naturally gloomy. It goes with the fact that they are risk-averse: a large literature confirms that people much more viscerally dislike losing a sum of money than they like winning the same sum. And it seems that pessimism genes might quite literally be commoner than optimism genes: only about 20 per cent of people are homozygous for the long version of the serotonin transporter gene, which possibly endows them with a genetic tendency to look on the bright side.

“But,” he says, “two things went off the scale: one was the total amount of oil; the other was that when the protocols were written, no one envisioned injecting dispersants at depths of five thousand feet.
“And we had what I call ‘the social and political nullification’ of the National Contingency Plan,” he says. In other words, the public and politicians weren’t buying the constraints of the law. Main case in point: “The National Contingency Plan says the spiller is the ‘responsible party.’ That means they have to be there with you. But having BP with us created cognitive dissonance with the public. People didn’t understand; how could BP be part of the command structure? But that was what the law required.”
He thinks it would be best to have a third party—not the oil company, not government—in charge of spill response. “Too much perception of conflicts of interest otherwise,” he says.
Another problem: “BP’s efforts to just keep writing checks to state and local governments—you can describe it any way you want—allowed those folks to act outside of federal coordination.

“You mentioned that these notes may have been taken in a subsequent conversation with someone else other than a meeting with the company,” said Minor. “Who could those people have been?”
“Well, the most obvious candidate is Bill Ackman.”
After a few hours, the tone of the questions was less aggressive. The attorneys seemed to be running through a checklist of issues. When Tilson got up to leave, one of the attorneys asked him, “Are you really friends with Bill Ackman?”
“The idea seemed to create incredible cognitive dissonance for him,” Tilson recalls.
WHEN ACKMAN RETURNED to the attorney general’s office to talk about Farmer Mac, the tension rose again. The lawyers turned their attention to Ackman’s comments in his research report on Farmer Mac, which suggested the company was funding long-term assets with high levels of short-term debt.
“Where are you getting your numbers to show what percent of the company’s debt is short term?”

This goes for the pharmaceutical industry, security companies, and all the others who promote and profit from fear. In fact, I’m quite sure that in most cases those promoting fear are sincere, for the simple reason that humans are compulsive rationalizers. People like to see themselves as being basically good, and so admitting that they are promoting fear in others in order to advance their interests sets up a nasty form of cognitive dissonance: I know I’m basically a nice person; what I’m doing is awful and wrong. Those are two thoughts that do not sit comfortably in the same head and the solution is rationalization: Suburban housewives really are at risk if they don’t buy my home alarm, and I’m doing them a service by telling them so. Self-interest and sincere belief seldom part company.
The marketing of fear for political advantage has become so ubiquitous that the phrase “the politics of fear” is almost a cliché, but still many doubt the power of fearful messages to influence voters.

I bet you never even bothered to check what it felt like from inside –"
"– I did –" Sirhan freezes for a moment, personality modules paging in and out of his brain like a swarm of angry bees – "make a fool of myself," he adds quietly, then slumps back in his seat. "This is so embarrassing … " He covers his face with his hands. "You're right."
"I am?" Rita's puzzlement slowly gives way to understanding; Sirhan has finally integrated the memories from the partials they hybridized earlier. Stuck-up and proud, the cognitive dissonance must be enormous. "No, I'm not. You're just overly defensive."
"I'm –" Embarrassed. Because Rita knows him, inside out. Has the ghost-memories of six months in a simspace with him, playing with ideas, exchanging intimacies, later confidences. She holds ghost-memories of his embrace, a smoky affair that might have happened in real space if his instant reaction to realizing that it could happen hadn't been to dump the splinter of his mind that was contaminated by impure thoughts to cold storage and deny everything.

Take the for loop in the above quicksort algorithm:
for x in array: if x < pivot: less.append(x) else: greater.append(x)
A colon denotes the start of an indented code block after which all of the code must be indented by the same amount until the end of the block. In another language, you might instead have something like:
for x in array { if x < pivot { less.append(x) } else { greater.append(x) } }
One major reason that whitespace matters is that it results in most Python code looking cosmetically similar, which means less cognitive dissonance when you read a piece of code that you didn’t write yourself (or wrote in a hurry a year ago!). In a language without significant whitespace, you might stumble on some differently formatted code like:
for x in array { if x < pivot { less.append(x) } else { greater.append(x) } }
Love it or hate it, significant whitespace is a fact of life for Python programmers, and in my experience it helps make Python code a lot more readable than other languages I’ve used.

But even as the search for risk-management techniques was gaining popularity, the 1970s and the 1980s gave rise to new uncertainties that had never been encountered by people whose world view had been shaped by the benign experiences of the postwar era. Calamities struck, including the explosion in oil prices, the constitutional crisis caused by Watergate and the Nixon resignation, the hostage-taking in Teheran, and the disaster at Chernobyl. The cognitive dissonances created by these shocks were similar to those experienced by the Victorians and the Edwardians during the First World War.
Along with financial deregulation and a wild inflationary sleighride, the environment generated volatility in interest rates, foreign exchange rates, and commodity prices that would have been unthinkable during the preceding three decades. Conventional forms of risk management were incapable of dealing with a world so new, so unstable, and so frightening.

A house full of people; a crowded table ranging across the generations; four-hand music at the piano; nonstop conversation and cooking; baseball games and swimming in the afternoon; long walks after dinner; a poker game or Diplomacy or charades in the evening, all these activities mixing adults and children—that was our idea of a well-ordered household and more specifically of a well-ordered education.… Home was not to be thought of as the nuclear family.5
Lasch wasn’t engaging in some loopy utopian fantasy as much as he was voicing some cognitive dissonance about the future. Despite our being increasingly tethered to the devices that connect us virtually, there has not been a corresponding uptick in well-being. In fact, it’s the reverse. By and large we’re lonelier and unhappier than we were in the decades before the Internet age.6 Psychologists don’t know why that is exactly, though we do know that close relationships are the strongest drivers of happiness, and that being alone and unaffiliated makes us the most unhappy.

Those who agreed with Aram formed a separate line to speak, and the organizers of the assembly began to let people from the two lines speak in alternation, until it became clear from the muttering from the crowd, including even short bursts of laughter as each new talk began, that the effect of the alternation was unhelpful. Contemplating two starkly different futures back and forth was perhaps too much like a debating society exercise, but because the topic debated was life or death for them, the back-and-forth engendered first cognitive dissonance, then estrangement: some laughed, others looked sick.
Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options. Of course every human faces the fact of individual death, and therefore existential nausea must be to a certain extent a universal experience, and something that must be dealt with by one mental strategy or another.

“I think I’ll go to the store,” and “I think it’s raining,” and “I think, therefore I am,” and “I think the Yankees will win the World Series,” and “I think I’m Napoleon,” and “I think he said he would be here, but I’m not sure”—all use the same word to mean entirely different things. Which of them might a machine do someday? I think that’s an important question.
Could a machine get confused? Experience cognitive dissonance? Dream? Wonder? Forget the name of that guy over there and at the same time know that it really knows the answer and if it just thinks about something else for a while, it might remember? Lose track of time? Decide to get a puppy? Have low self-esteem? Have suicidal thoughts? Get bored? Worry? Pray? I think not.
Can artificial mechanisms be constructed to play the part in gathering information and making decisions that human beings now play?

It irritates and upsets us, even though
we know that "Aunt Ethel doesn't know any better." We banish it hastily to the top shelf of
the closet.
Aunt Ethel's toaster or tablewear is not important, in and of itself. But it is a message
from a different subcultural world, and unless we are weak in commitment to our own style,
unless we happen to be in transition between styles, it represents a potent threat. The
psychologist Leon Festinger coined the term "cognitive dissonance" to mean the tendency of
a person to reject or deny information that challenges his preconceptions. We don't want to
hear things that may upset our carefully worked out structure of beliefs. Similarly, Aunt
Ethel's gift represents an element of "stylistic dissonance." It threatens to undermine our
carefully worked out style of life.
Why does the life style have this power to preserve itself?

The door closed behind it.
“It’s an elevator,” said Pelorat, with a pleased air of discovery.
“So it is,” said Bander. “Once we went underground, we never truly emerged. Nor would we want to, though I find it pleasant to feel the sunlight on occasion. I dislike clouds or night in the open, however. That gives one the sensation of being underground without truly being underground, if you know what I mean. That is cognitive dissonance, after a fashion, and I find it very unpleasant.”
“Earth built underground,” said Pelorat. “The Caves of Steel, they called their cities. And Trantor built underground, too, even more extensively, in the old Imperial days. —And Comporellon builds underground right now. It is a common tendency, when you come to think of it.”
“Half-humans swarming underground and we living underground in isolated splendor are two widely different things,” said Bander.

"I'm going, I'm going," I say, and I shuffle away from poor, damaged Cass. Cass who I thought was Kay, obsessing over her, when all the time Kay was sleeping in the next room, and Cass was living in a nightmare.
I have a problem with the ethics here, I think. Hanta's not bad. But she collaborates with Fiore and Yourdon. What kind of person would do that? I shake my head, wincing at the cognitive dissonance. One who'd perform illegal memory surgery then implant the recollection of giving informed consent in the victim's mind? I shake my head again. I don't really think Hanta would do that, but I can't be sure. If the patient agrees with the practitioner afterward, is it really abuse?
IT'S a bright, sunny Thursday morning when Hanta comes and sits by my bedside with a clipboard. "Well!" Her smile is fresh and approving.

Head shots, head shots. . . . Kill the sons of bitches.”34
That was G. Gordon Liddy, giving his listeners home defense advice on his syndicated radio show in August 1994. It was some remarkable language to be coming from the guy who helped create ODALE, the Nixon-era office that sent narcotics task forces barreling into homes to make headline-grabbing drug busts. And Giddy was still suffering from cognitive dissonance. In the same interview, he lamented that it wasn’t a federal felony to possess a personal use amount of illicit drugs.35 And of course narcotics cops hit the wrong house many, many more times than ATF agents did. Liddy wasn’t offended by the tactics as much as he was by the mission (gun control) and the people who were calling the shots at the time (Bill Clinton and Janet Reno).
Still, this was part of something new.

Another worker died in March when he fell from a high row of bleachers he was installing. This meant the temporary seating for twenty thousand of the sixty thousand fans now in the stadium had never been fully tested.
In the event, though, nothing collapsed on live TV. And the Seleção beat Croatia three–one. And that night, despite the general ill will, Brazilians all around the country celebrated the win, and much cachaça and beer was consumed with varying degrees of cognitive dissonance.
Normally, weeks in advance of the World Cup, people would hang the Brazilian flag from their windows and paint their streets green and yellow. This time São Paulo looked as it usually does, beige. A lot of Brazilians had decided to root against the national team. A friend of mine, Vinícius, put it like this: “The thing is that if we win, people are going to say it was all somehow worth it.”

Some of the language from my congressional testimony also found its way into the Stimson Commission’s report on U.S. drone policy, for which I served as primary author. See Rosa Brooks, “Drone Wars: The Constitutional and Counterterrorism Implications of Targeted Killing,” Hearing Before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights of the Subcommittee on the Judiciary, 113th Cong., April 23, 2013; Rosa Brooks, ”Drones and Cognitive Dissonance,” in Peter L. Bergen and Daniel Rothenberg, eds., Drone Wars: Transforming Conflict, Law, and Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 230–52; John P. Abizaid, Rosa Brooks, and Rachel Stohl, “Recommendations and Report of the Task Force on US Drone Policy,” Stimson Center, May 12, 2014, www.stimson.org/spotlight/recommendations-and-report-of-the-stimson-task-force-on-us-drone-policy/.
4.

Modern liberals believe that individual free choices provide life with meaning. They are all equally delusional.
Doubts about the existence of free will and individuals are nothing new, of course. Thinkers in India, China and Greece argued that ‘the individual self is an illusion’ more than 2,000 years ago. Yet such doubts don’t really change history unless they have a practical impact on economics, politics and day-to-day life. Humans are masters of cognitive dissonance, and we allow ourselves to believe one thing in the laboratory and an altogether different thing in the courthouse or in parliament. Just as Christianity didn’t disappear the day Darwin published On the Origin of Species, so liberalism won’t vanish just because scientists have reached the conclusion that there are no free individuals.
Indeed, even Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and the other champions of the new scientific world view refuse to abandon liberalism.

The recovery strategy takes into account the need for social justice and fairness, both across and within generations. . . . The Greek programme rests upon very strong foundations.” Was it irrational optimism, a belief that things would really work out that way? Or bureaucrat hypocrisy—they knew what they were supposed to say, and the incongruence between the world and these words was of little moment. Call it cognitive dissonance run wild, or dishonesty, as you will.
There is something in the last memorandum, signed soon after the Greek voters had rejected essentially the same program by an overwhelming vote of 61 percent, a vote supported by the Greek government, which provides more than a hint that it was sheer hypocrisy: the agreement begins by affirming, “Success requires ownership of the reform agenda programme by the Greek authorities,” and suggesting that there is that ownership.

There’s something in common between Smith’s everyday activities—his political activism and the institutional racism he’s observed in these communities—and his Twitter project. (When we spoke, Smith said he was working on a book project that would also examine the history of racism in public policy in the South.)
His account is particularly interesting because he seeks out people who start by hedging their comments—“I’m not racist, but . . .”—only to spill out remarkably prejudiced comments. Each of these tweets arrives with a sort of cognitive dissonance baked into it—a prophylactic denial of being racist followed by a clear example of that very sin. Smith explained how widespread he’s found this phenomenon to be: “It’s really opened my eyes to how many people, especially young people, don’t seem to understand the concept of racism. It seems like they think that unless you’re out there lynching somebody or burning a cross in someone’s yard, then you’re not a racist.”

Some white doctors, perhaps sympathetic to plantation owners’ desire for abundant, cheap labor, encouraged black women to bear many children, and others even prescribed sexual activity to preteen girls “as a way of keeping fit.”78 As Orleck reports, in the early 1960s: In Chicago, single women who had babies while on AFDC were threatened with jail time, but caseworkers were prohibited from sending them to Planned Parenthood clinics that dispensed free contraceptives.79
Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to be a member of the U.S. Congress, called it “compulsory pregnancy” for poor women.80 And yet, by the early 1930s the forced sterilization of the “unfit” and the “feeble-minded” had been expressly permitted in thirty states, and twenty-two states still had such laws on the books in 1973.81 Perhaps this reveals a national cognitive dissonance regarding black women: their fertility is, on the one hand, a perceived threat to the public purse and to white domination, yet their ample reproduction can help the continued production of a cheap, docile labor force.
As with so much, debates about birth control take many forms. A 1968 statement by the Black Unity Party of Peekskill, New York:The Brothers are calling on the Sisters not to take the pill.

And if you can rig your own rooftop weatherNode that happens to provide more accurate data, well, good for you! You innovated on the edge, and the market rewards you for it. The incentives for innovation on open networks are aligned to increase efficiency better than closed networks.
Dueling Bots
What about conflicts of interest? If the weatherNode started expanding its capability and entered the crop insurance marketplace, wouldn’t it have cognitive dissonance? Farmer weatherNodes want to emphasize the impact of droughts, and insurer weatherNodes claim droughts are minimal. The owners and designers of agents need transparency of operations. If both are filtering sensor data through a biased screen, then their respective reputations will drop.
Vitalik Buterin points out that autonomous agents are challenging to create, because to survive and succeed they need to be able to navigate in a complicated, rapidly changing, or even hostile environment.

We are grateful to those who help us, particularly in times of greatest need. We are sensitive to the criticism that we are too negative; we like to say positive things. We deal constantly with the industry and make friends. We are reluctant to see our friends as crooks, and we know how embarrassing it would be if the CEO we recruited and praised turned out to be a fraud. We are subject to cognitive dissonance.
The combination of these factors meant that Bank Board supervisors were very unlikely to expose the goodwill accounting scams. Two other things compounded this problem. Very few people, even within the Bank Board, understood how the scam worked. I don’t want to overstate this point—many people were skeptical that goodwill was real—but only a handful knew how goodwill and mark-to-market virtually guaranteed substantial fictitious profits if the insolvency of the acquired S&L was large relative to the size of the acquirer.